Still no “CPU Exceeded” messages since October 6, so my additional $20 per month seems to be paying off. I still haven’t heard about my reservation at slicehost, but I’ll definitely consider that when it comes through.
In the meanwhile, I took my daughter’s old Dell machine that was taken out of commission when we got her a Mac this summer and turned it into a pure Linux box. I replaced the 80 Gb drive with a 320 Gb one, which ironically cost the same as the smaller drive did when I had to stick it in the machine a year ago. The memory is a little bit light at 512Mb but I plan to upgrade that to at least 1Gb, maybe 2.
I plan to store a lot of photographs on the machine and do a fair amount of image processing, so that’s why I’m opting for more storage and more memory. Ubuntu runs quite nicely for normal tasks in the 512Mb.
I was waiting to do this work on the machine until after the latest Ubuntu came out, which it did on Thursday as version 7.10. So I now have a smart little desktop pure Linux machine. I plan to do the sutor.com website development on this box and have it be a clone of the hosted sit.
Don’t be lured in by Ubuntu too blindly. If Web development and hosting is what you are after, there are more specialised Debian-based distros out there.
Re: CPU, it’s somewhat of a madness that you even have this as a concern (burden) or a factor. I don’t know about your former host, but if you get pains like this, it is (was?) indeed time to move on. Ideally, you should completely forget you even /have/ a Web host.