I originally commented on Isabel Wang’s blog post on Ubuntu Linux and dedicated server providers, but somehow the comment disappeared. Hopefully it is not censorship in place :) So I am gathering my thoughts again, and will put them here.

I am a long time Gentoo Linux man, which is not hard to figure out from reading my posts here. However, recently I am thinking about giving Ubuntu a try. Source-based Linux distributions like Gentoo is great if you like to tinker, and have lots of time on your hands. However when you have multiple servers and VPS to administer, and what you are supposed to do is to focus on software development — managing all those Gentoo boxes can just be too time consuming.

Last night I was bashing BlueHost for suspending Zazz’s site, but there’s something that I need to applause BlueHost for — Matt Heaton is standing firm on not hosting adult sites. Not because they chew through bandwidth, but it is simply not ethical.

Bluehost does not and will not tolerate adult material of any kind on our servers. Sometimes profit comes second and personal responsibility and ethics come first. I am not telling other hosts to not provide adult hosting services, but I wish that they would come to that conclusion on their own.

Adult material hurts people in so many ways that I won’t even argue the point here. Aside from my own beliefs about why it is wrong, I don’t think that any clear thinking individual would argue for the merits of porn. It is a business that I will never practice or enable through our network.

Seriously. If your business depends solely on your website, and you are expecting lots of visitors when sales are on — don’t host it on a shared host. Especially ones that are obviously overselling.

Sun’s Project Blackbox — data center in a standard 20-foot shipping container, coming mid-next year, which CEO Jonathan Schwartz introduced here. Up to 250 servers, or 1.5 perabytes of storage. All you need is space, power and water to have your own data center hosted. Let me check my backyard — space? Just fit. Power? Check — I’ll pull one from the house. It is supposed to be power efficient, right? Water? Feel free to use one of my gardening hose. Looks like I am all ready to power the next mega Web 2.0 company!

Better, if it can indeed get electricity from solar power, like this image showing on Sun’s website. That would save me a few dollars on bills from Energy Australia.

Starting price? $500,000. Which would be peanuts if you get acquired by Google for 1.65 billion dollars.

Via TechCrunch, MediaTemple has introduced its Grid-Server hosting product, superseding their old shared hosting products.

It is basically a cluster of web servers/application servers connecting to a fast array of storage (SAN?), and load balancers or routers placed in front of the web servers to evenly distribute the requests across individual physical servers in the grid. A new measurement, Grid Performance Unit, is introduced to measure how much CPU time your account has used.

Michael Arrington has also interviewed the MediaTemple guys on TalkCrunch, talking about the ideas behind their latest offerings.

Sunday evening. I sent an email to Unixshell billing with a request to terminate my account. A few email exchanges later, on Monday evening, my ex-7 month old Xen VPS stopped responding to ping, and I was no longer a Unixshell customer.

Two months ago I had written an article on tuning GCC parameters for compilation under low-memory VPS, by limiting the maximum memory it can use, which is often useful on user-bean-counter based VPS’s (OpenVZ and non-SLM Virtuozzo). It worked in most cases on my 256Mb VPS at VPSLink, but in some circumstances the packages just won’t compile.

DreamHost is turning 9, and has announced a few crazy things in its birthday bash.

While I am doing most my own websites are done in PHP, during the day I wrote web-based financial-planning applications for one of the largest deployment in Australia in this simple, elegant and yet powerful programming language — Python.

Python is a great language, and there are many great Python web frame-works out there (which is one of its strength but also weakness). However, we do not see heaps of ready-to-install open-source web applications written in Python, unlike PHP. One of the biggest issue is difficulties to deploy — PHP is pretty much everywhere, but many web hosts don’t even support Python.

Here I am going to share about getting your Python-based website/web-application hosted.