[UFO Chicago] Shell hosting company(ies)?

[Jordan Bettis]

On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 03:42:19PM +0100, Nick Moffitt wrote:
> about it, I recommend getting the smallest linode possible on a yearly
> plan, installing Ubuntu 6.06.2 LTS on it, and putting the
> unattended-upgrades system in effect.

I'm not impressed with Ubuntu LTS compared to Debian Stable.

The set of packages they 'support' (basically, not stuff in the
'universe' repo) is pretty small, and doesn't include things that I
would consider essential for many servers, like libpam-ldap. If such
packages need work over the lifetime of the install, where does that
leave us two years down the road? Hoping our system is compatible with
the update from debian stable?

Also the support they do provide is pretty lacking, if there are
problems with the package they just backport the most recent release
from upstream into the 'stable' release, so all the sudden a security
update has the potential to become a major software update. Debian
Stable backports the fix to the bug--and only that fix--to the version
of the package in stable.

I've also now gone through several major upgrades between stable
releases now with Debian and have never had any problem. I've not been
using Ubuntu LTS long enough to go through that yet (and actually, it
hasn't been around long enough for Canonical to have gone through it
yet) so again, there's a huge question mark as to how rigorous
Canonical's going to be about getting major version upgrades *right*.