This site is was hosted on a virtual server I rent from TekTonic. I've been very happy with their service, except for one thing. I like to run the latest version of Ubuntu. This site isn't particularly mission critical and I like to be able to play with the latest version of Python, Git, apache, erlang, etc. TekTonic, however, only supports Ubuntu's LTS releases, the latest of which (Dapper) was released in June 2006, and feels that "customers [who] want a newer non-LTS release.. can run an apt upgrade." I don't really have a big problem with this policy, it's certainly their prerogative, but I have yet to successfully perform an upgrade on their VPSs this way.

Of course, that doesn't stop me from trying, and today I decided to finally upgrade to Gutsy. Nine hours later I finally have this blog back up, but the rest of my space (Git, stuff.occident.us, etc) may be a little longer coming back. The biggest change is that I've switch hosting providers to linode.com. I'm excited about this change for a number of reasons:

More default distros

Current count: 15, including Gutsy. Whoo hoo!

More geographical choices

Atlanta, Dallas, Fremont. My previous hosting was in Philadelphia, and I definitely notice the decreased ping time from being physically closer to the server.

Xen hosting

I worked with Xen in college, and I'm really excited to see that linode is offering a beta Xen service. Word is that performance is considerably better (than their default UML) and I signed up right away.

Swap space

I didn't have swap space on my last box, which was definitely a bummer. The new one has as much as I want, which might come in handy if I want to run Cosmo someday.

Support

IRC, ticket based help, and so far insanely fast response. Definitely a plus.

NB: This is all based on about 6 hours of experience with Linode, but I'm pretty impressed so far. More updates as I have them.