An introduction to me and my situation: I've been wanting to set up a MUD of my own, coding it from scratch, for quite some time. However, I'm a newbie coder and Linux user. I tried other Linux/MUD hosts, and got the usual account on a shared distribution, and so I was usually limited to the versions of every application that were already installed. My alternative, on one host, was to be able to install my own server applications, but of course it had to be installed in my own area and anything that required root access was out of the question. For a long time I struggled to determine whether my problems were an access problem or my own inadequacy :)
Similar facilities to the Linode are obviously available out there - but they've always seemed so expensive for someone who simply wanted to develop and learn. Few of us have money to burn :) When I discovered the Linode website and saw the price for the facilities, I spent ages searching around for some sort of drawback. It seemed simply too good to be true. Root access, huge amounts of disk space by comparison to what I was used to, and the ease with which I could swap around different distributions - I love it! My Linode was set up within about half an hour of my ordering it. Everything that I've tried to install, everything I've coded, has worked 100 times better than before, so easily. As soon as I'm really sure of what I'm doing, I'm going to be cancelling my existing web / DNS hosting package elsewhere (I hate not being able to directly access my DNS records) and moving the whole shebang over to my Linode - which will save me quite a bit of money.
Thank you, Chris, for this awesome setup. I would -really- miss it if for some reason I ever lost my Linode.
