linode
I have been meaning to move my personal MoinMoin wiki that was installed on my laptop to some secure place online where I can access it from anywhere. MoinMoin is written in Python, so I needed a place where I could host an online Python application. In addition, I use xapian indexing on all of my wiki pages, so I needed to either have that already available or have the flexibility to install it myself.
I decided to find someplace that offered good value on VPS hosting, one that allowed me to use the operating system of my choice, Ubuntu, where I would have complete control over the environment and be able to build and install anything that I needed.
So yesterday I consulted Google and, after a bit of review-checking, decided to give linode a try.
What a great decision that was! I signed up for the Linode 512 plan: 512MB RAM, 20GB storage, 200GB data transfer, dedicated IP address, Ubuntu 11.10. Perfect! It took maybe 1 minute from the time I made my decision until I had an operational instance with root access. Ran updates, installed a few packages, copied my data over, done.
cheapssls
So next thing I needed was an SSL certificate because I wanted to serve up my private wiki only over SSL. I brought it up with a self-signed certificate. That worked fine of course but I thought if I could purchase one for a decent price it would be worth it — if only to avoid the annoying browser warnings. Again after some Google-fu I decided to give cheapssls a try.
Another score! I paid only $23.97 for an SSL certificate that is good for 3 years. Again very easy. I ordered the certificate and then, while waiting to hear back from them, generated the CSR. By the time I had done that my cert was ready to activate. Pasted in the CSR, submitted it, and just a few minutes later I had my new certificate.
Dropped it in place, tweaked Apache config, and that was it.
summary