[Harp-L] Minding the machine at Harp-L

[Ben Nathanson <bjnath@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'd like to add to the history discussion a mention of Harp-L present. In particular, I want to put in a good word for our service provider, RimuHosting.com. 

Actually I want to jump up and down and shout. 
A large part of how smoothly Harp-L works today is thanks to the RimuHosting's excellent product and support.

They're smart and love their work. Unlike a lot of providers, there's no dopey help desk: They hear you when you talk geek. And, more important, they hear you when you just hosed the web server and can't remember a word of geek.

In the world of providers they offer a somewhat specialized service -- virtual private servers. The server appears to be all yours -- you can log in as root, you can reboot anytime, you can rm -rf *, you can remodel your OS.

It's your life and your box. They owe you nothing but warm hardware. What's great, though, is how much farther they'll go when you need it. 

First, they preinstall a lot of good applications, and often will custom install for free. They preinstalled and configured Mailman for us.

Second, when, root-giddily, you do yourself in, they will help bail you out. Even though it's your own damn fault. The most recent time they did this I swore I could keep it to myself no longer and would shout it to the list.

Uptime has been wonderful. They are vigilant; they anticipate problems; and in the unlikely event you spot something before they do, they respond right away.

We pay $19.95 a month for this. Never has anyone gotten better value from a dollar.

(Though their website has a number of good how-to Linux articles, for free.)