I haven't used their VPS but you can look into Dreamhost. I've been very happy with my shared web account.

For what it's worth, I used to think I needed a VPS as well. Then I found myself with limited funds for awhile so I transferred my site to Dreamhost on their shared hosting plan. At the time they had a deal that it was around $48 to pre-pay for 2 years. It averages out to about $1.95/month. In addition to the unlimited domains/disk/bandwidth and mysql database, the account comes with 1 free domain registration, easy setup to have email hosted either through Dreamhost themselves or through Google Apps [which I do]. And it comes with a shell account, which is on the webserver itself running Debian. They have all kinds of one-click installs for various blogs and ecommerce options and whatnot.
As for stuff like git, I'm not sure. I see that there are some git commands on the server, but I don't know if it's possible to run a git server.

At first I thought I would hate it, and would be transferring back to a VPS/Dedicated server first chance I got. Well, it's been 2.5 years now and I have no desire to switch back. I haven't really missed having root access, and it's nice not to have to worry so much about managing everything. Admittedly, this is just personal sites of fairly low importance, but I've been happy with the setup so far. And they don't seem to mind me sitting on irssi on the shell account all day. The only thing it does is it will automatically kill any single process which has been running for a week.

Anyway, it's worth a look and if you don't like it, I think they have a relatively painless process to transfer to a VPS.

As an added bonus, they've been against SOPA since November, according to their official blog.

I'd like to point out that Dreamhost appears to have been against SOPA from the very beginning. Here's a post on their official blog from November

For anyone looking for GoDaddy alternatives, there's plenty of options, but as a happy customer I'd personally like to direct your attention to Dreamhost. I don't host anything busy, so my personal sites are happy on their shared hosting platform for which I pay a whopping $1.95/month [$48 total to pre-pay 2 years]. Again, without any crazy high traffic, their shared hosting is plenty fast for me. In addition, I get to host unlimited domains, unlimited space/bandwidth [until it affects the shared server of course] including mysql database. And the account comes with one free domain registration. Additional domains are price pretty typically, $9.95 for com/net/org domains. On top of all that, you get a debian shell account [non-root of course] which has worked out great for me. Obviously if you've got busy sites you might want some dedicated or VPS servers or something but they have those too.

Today I transferred my 3 domains over there and everything went smoothly. Even on GoDaddy's end, amazingly. The transfers were all fully complete within about 1.5 hours.

I don't work for them or anything. I'm just a happy customer.

That's exactly it. Of course that much is not going to be noticeable to GoDaddy, but it's terrible PR. They haven't just lost the LOLcat people. I've transferred away my 3 domains and hundreds of others like me have done the same if I'm to believe the posts here and on Ars. And I, like many others are posting about it on Social network sites and our friends hear about it. And then when they're considering a domain registration, they're more likely to look elsewhere and so on. Given that GoDaddy has bothered to publicly claim to reverse their stance already, it must be making some kind of impact over there.

Maybe not major in and of itself, but apparently the person who owns that domain also has over 1000 other domains registered with GoDaddy, so they'll be losing a fair chunk of renewal money there.

Ditto ditto. My 3 domains are transferred off already. Honestly I've been planning on doing so anyway as GoDaddy sucks in so many other ways, so their change in course on SOPA is too-little too-late.

I was forced to install it recently. Some PDFs from my state government required it. If I tried to open them in Preview, it complained that it needed a newer version of Acrobat Reader. So I installed it, printed what I needed, then removed it.

A lot of less technical folks though would have just kept it. Assuming the figured out that they needed to install it in the first place.

If your IT/Security staff can rifle through your sensitive data, you're doing it wrong.

I have no ability to access the data in our HR or Financial systems. Only the HR and Financial folks do. *MAYBE* the DBAs could look at that data, but even if so they'd have to sift through the raw data or come up with their own queries. And I'm pretty sure a lot of that information is encrypted.

I find it quite the coincidence that this is the first Slashdot article I've looked at today, and lo and behold, I have mod points!!

If they aren't responding, call them every day [or every hour if need be] until they dispatch a tech or ship the part.

Fan and fan-board failures on our T-series boxes [6 x T5220 + 4 T5240] are annoyingly common. Fans we usually have shipped to us overnight. Fan-board we usually have onsite with a technician to install it within 1-2 days. We're not that large of a customer to demand more prompt service or anything, we have about 2-dozen Sun servers [mix of T-series and X-series].

I don't know where people are getting this $1000/socket bullsh*t. Maybe that's some ridiculous list price, but unless you're a moron, you won't pay anywhere close to that for full HW and OS support on Sun/Oracle hardware. The last time we renewed our support, I believe it was in the realm of $400-800/yr for HW/OS support on our x86 servers [dual socket Opterons and quad-socket Xeons]. The SPARC servers were a bit more expensive, closer to $2000 for support on a T5240 [dual-socket 8-core x 8-thread/core T3+ CPUs]. Remember, that includes HW support, fans, HDs, RAM, CPUs, motherboard replacements, whatever with same-day onsite service [well, in theory, in practice it's often the next day, but most of our hw failures aren't critical to our services so we don't push them very hard].

That's not to say I love Oracle's support since the buyout. Though HW failures are typically handled fairly quickly, their support website is a nightmare, and getting an IDR [Interrum patch] on anything less than a major OS bug can be a long-term process, but I'm not sure it's significantly worse than any other vendor's support in the long-run.

So, you bitch because Ubuntu changes too much/too often. But when given a solution which remains stable for a reasonably long period of time, you bitch because it doesn't change enough? Dare I ask what it is you're actually expecting that isn't possible with Ubuntu? You can have a stable [from release changes] OS and pick the pieces you want to be newer/bleeding edge, or not as you like. What's the problem there?

Well, my sister is fairly intelligent but is by no means a geek or 'computer scientist'. She's lucky she can turn on a computer and use facebook. Despite her minimal computer knowledge and abilities, she's had no issues using and loving her Droid Incredible android phone over the last couple years. She loves it, and has no desire to move to an iPhone, and probably hasn't even ever heard of a Windows phone; though I'm pretty sure she's smart enough to avoid any phone that runs 'Windows'...

Balmer is an idiot and MS would do well to get rid of him.

I don't find that's the case at all. I had a system that came with Vista. It was certainly under-powered for Vista, with a single-core Athlon 64, 2GB RAM and the slowest 120GB SATA drive on the planet. The system was absolutely horrible. It took forever to boot, and the disk thrashed constantly. When Win7 came out, I upgraded the system [it was free for me through school]. Win7 wasn't exactly a speed demon on the system, but it ran smoothly, and I didn't have to sit there twiddling my thumbs waiting for the disk to stop thrashing every time I clicked the mouse.

Over time, I upgraded the system to a dual-core Athlon64, 4GB RAM and a pair of 10K WD Raptor drives. It ran really really well on Win7. Then for various reason, I tried to go back to Vista on that machine. Even with all the upgrades, the OS was simply unusable. It literally took a solid 3 days of upgrades and reboots just to get it up to SP2. The service packs helped performance a bit, but even with the most current updates, and all the HW upgrades, the system was still slow and unusable.

So I'd say the issues with Vista at launch were not simply an issue of the HW not being up to snuff. No matter the HW, Win7 was far, far more smooth, usable and stable than Vista ever was.

What a great way to waste $20! We picked up one of those packs some time back. They are by far the most useless batteries on the planet. In total that pack of 100 AA batteries lasted us about as long as a 4-pack of name-brand batteries.

For non-rechargeable AA batteries I've come to like Rayovac. Much cheaper than Energizer/Duracell, and they last almost as long.

Actually I was wondering if maybe there was some standing bet or ultimatum that CmdrTaco would have to retire from Slashdot when Steve Jobs retired from Apple.

At any rate, I have to add my voice to the chorus of "Thank You CmdrTaco!" Slashdot is by far the site I have been regularly visiting for the longest time and I wouldn't have it any other way.