options for Unix shell accounts? (email, web)
I've been pleased with the service I've gotten for the last 14 years from a small, independent provider, but they, like many of their peers, are having trouble staying afloat. I really hope they make it, but it would be wise for me to find out what else is out there. So, dear LazyWeb, since I haven't done this in a very long time, I figured I'd start with the counsel of my friends (and anybody else who's reading this), before I start a wider search.
I use my Unix shell account for two primary purposes: email and basic web stuff. The reason I don't just do email locally on my home machine is that I want it to be accessible from anywhere; my current employer doesn't permit outbound SSH (or personal email), but that hasn't always been true and, anyway, sometimes I'm away from home.1 So I use ssh to log in to a machine somewhere out there in the ether (ok, in Philadelphia), and run Pine there. Pine (or I suppose Alpine, from what I've heard) is important because it's plain text. I don't want to have to deal with all the formatting crap that people send in email these days. If I really need to see it I'll bop over to Gmail, but I want to read in plain text in a font size of my choosing. Pine does that for me.
As for web stuff, we're talking a small number of static pages, and I don't have my own domain name. (Separately I'd like to learn "personal domain management 101", but it doesn't need to be now.) I'm not doing anything with SQL, ASP/PHP/CGI, or server-side anything.
A couple other things that ought to be "duh": FTP to move files back and forth, emacs for local editing, and some reasonable backup story at their end (for the mail, mainly). Procmail, too.
I want to purchase this service, not mooch off of the kindness of friends (who may get distracted, or busy, or less interested later, or whatever).
So who do y'all use?
1 Why don't I just run locally on my machine and accept ssh connections from outside? Well, mainly because my DSL doesn't come with a static IP, but also because I don't know how.
I use my Unix shell account for two primary purposes: email and basic web stuff. The reason I don't just do email locally on my home machine is that I want it to be accessible from anywhere; my current employer doesn't permit outbound SSH (or personal email), but that hasn't always been true and, anyway, sometimes I'm away from home.1 So I use ssh to log in to a machine somewhere out there in the ether (ok, in Philadelphia), and run Pine there. Pine (or I suppose Alpine, from what I've heard) is important because it's plain text. I don't want to have to deal with all the formatting crap that people send in email these days. If I really need to see it I'll bop over to Gmail, but I want to read in plain text in a font size of my choosing. Pine does that for me.
As for web stuff, we're talking a small number of static pages, and I don't have my own domain name. (Separately I'd like to learn "personal domain management 101", but it doesn't need to be now.) I'm not doing anything with SQL, ASP/PHP/CGI, or server-side anything.
A couple other things that ought to be "duh": FTP to move files back and forth, emacs for local editing, and some reasonable backup story at their end (for the mail, mainly). Procmail, too.
I want to purchase this service, not mooch off of the kindness of friends (who may get distracted, or busy, or less interested later, or whatever).
So who do y'all use?
1 Why don't I just run locally on my machine and accept ssh connections from outside? Well, mainly because my DSL doesn't come with a static IP, but also because I don't know how.