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options for Unix shell accounts? (email, web)
I've been pleased with the service I've gotten for the last 14 years from a small, independent provider, but they, like many of their peers, are having trouble staying afloat. I really hope they make it, but it would be wise for me to find out what else is out there. So, dear LazyWeb, since I haven't done this in a very long time, I figured I'd start with the counsel of my friends (and anybody else who's reading this), before I start a wider search.
I use my Unix shell account for two primary purposes: email and basic web stuff. The reason I don't just do email locally on my home machine is that I want it to be accessible from anywhere; my current employer doesn't permit outbound SSH (or personal email), but that hasn't always been true and, anyway, sometimes I'm away from home.1 So I use ssh to log in to a machine somewhere out there in the ether (ok, in Philadelphia), and run Pine there. Pine (or I suppose Alpine, from what I've heard) is important because it's plain text. I don't want to have to deal with all the formatting crap that people send in email these days. If I really need to see it I'll bop over to Gmail, but I want to read in plain text in a font size of my choosing. Pine does that for me.
As for web stuff, we're talking a small number of static pages, and I don't have my own domain name. (Separately I'd like to learn "personal domain management 101", but it doesn't need to be now.) I'm not doing anything with SQL, ASP/PHP/CGI, or server-side anything.
A couple other things that ought to be "duh": FTP to move files back and forth, emacs for local editing, and some reasonable backup story at their end (for the mail, mainly). Procmail, too.
I want to purchase this service, not mooch off of the kindness of friends (who may get distracted, or busy, or less interested later, or whatever).
So who do y'all use?
1 Why don't I just run locally on my machine and accept ssh connections from outside? Well, mainly because my DSL doesn't come with a static IP, but also because I don't know how.
I use my Unix shell account for two primary purposes: email and basic web stuff. The reason I don't just do email locally on my home machine is that I want it to be accessible from anywhere; my current employer doesn't permit outbound SSH (or personal email), but that hasn't always been true and, anyway, sometimes I'm away from home.1 So I use ssh to log in to a machine somewhere out there in the ether (ok, in Philadelphia), and run Pine there. Pine (or I suppose Alpine, from what I've heard) is important because it's plain text. I don't want to have to deal with all the formatting crap that people send in email these days. If I really need to see it I'll bop over to Gmail, but I want to read in plain text in a font size of my choosing. Pine does that for me.
As for web stuff, we're talking a small number of static pages, and I don't have my own domain name. (Separately I'd like to learn "personal domain management 101", but it doesn't need to be now.) I'm not doing anything with SQL, ASP/PHP/CGI, or server-side anything.
A couple other things that ought to be "duh": FTP to move files back and forth, emacs for local editing, and some reasonable backup story at their end (for the mail, mainly). Procmail, too.
I want to purchase this service, not mooch off of the kindness of friends (who may get distracted, or busy, or less interested later, or whatever).
So who do y'all use?
1 Why don't I just run locally on my machine and accept ssh connections from outside? Well, mainly because my DSL doesn't come with a static IP, but also because I don't know how.
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I don't know if they permit regular FTP, because I think they're security conscious. Presumably they support SFTP or FTPS, but I don't know: I use scp at the command line and am perfectly happy with it.
The two things you should know about them besides the fact they're in The Original Cambridge, are:
1) They can lag a bit with software updates on the server with the shell accounts:
2) They use FastCGI for PHP. If makes things weird and, IMHO, frustrating, because it's non-standard in some ways not all of which I've ironed out.
Support is pretty good. They're polite, and sometimes, if something is an emergency or just urgent-to-me, they've pulled out the stops to help. OTOH, I just got a bashful, "We fixed this thing you reported broken in May, sorry about the delay" email. They're sharp, if maybe overloaded with work, so they truly will run problems to ground.... eventually.
ETA: A big part of why I went with them was that I could affordably rent from them enough disk space for my whole email corpus. Most shell accounts out there that aren't jail shell don't let you move in 6G of 0.5k files.
My move to MB was pretty traumatic (the pasty-fueled transatlantic data migration of song and story), and they're not the best I've ever had (oh, Dan Parsons, I still miss you). But they're good enough for my purposes, and they've been swell folks to do business with.
Unlike, you know, Chris.
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I've found Chris fine to deal with, but as he notes, their capacity to respond to support queries isn't what it once was, and as they cut back more who knows what will happen? I want it to work out, but it's prudent to look elsewhere.
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They will auto-ban you for things like running Node.js, which I found...err...curious.
I can't recall if they do procmail, but everything else, yeah. Website, DNS hosting, shell account, web mail, log-in-and-pine, ftp. (Though these days I'd encourage you to use scp instead.)
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Thanks for the scp clue.
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FYI, the vast majority of hosting companies, even ones which are sshable, provide email through either a web interface (the standard three options are Horde, Squirrelmail, and Roundcube) or they provide the server and expect you to use a local client on your machine.
Dreamhost is, I understand, one of the rare ones that is okay with doing email in your shell account there, however, they were not happy when I asked about moving my email in. They got all agitated and pointed out that they have a line in the ToS that you won't use your space on their server for any sort of archive, and seemed to feel that my email would violate that. You may not have the same problem with volume that I do. I decided not to push it and to look elsewhere.
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and how much are you paying now..?
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I don't know enough to have an opinion on where exactly that mail lands, technology-wise -- mail spool vs imap vs ? -- so long as it's not Exchange. :-)
I'm currently paying $99/year.
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