VPS hosting

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Linux for blind general discussion <blinux-list at redhat.com> writes:

> With a VPS it's more like tou get a virtual machine and you're
> responsible for administering it.  You can usually choose the OS
> (usually from popular Linux distributions, but some also provide
> FreeBSD or OpenBSD which I've come to prefer), choose which servers
> you want to run (mail, web-server, database, IRC, whatever), install
> those, and you are responsible for upgrades too.  For these, I've been
> pleased with (or heard good things from people I trust about) OVH,
> Vultr, Digital Ocean, and Linode.

Hi, this is Chris Brannon.
I should mention up front that I work for a VPS hosting company,
Prgmr.com.  I've been using their service for 7 years, and I've been an
employee for just over a year.  One thing you should definitely consider
when buying VPS service is the accessibility of the out-of-band
console.  If your system breaks so badly that you cannot connect
to it via SSH to the VPS, you'll need to fix it from an out-of-band
console.  If the VPS provider provides this using a VNC
connection, it is completely inaccessible, because a VNC connection just
transmits bitmapped images rather than text.  A GUI screen reader like
Orca does not avail here, because those operate at a much higher
level of the GUI stack than the raw bitmap level.  Perhaps OCR is the
only recourse when dealing with a VNC connection.

With Prgmr.com, not only is the out-of-band console in text mode, but
all of the VPS management functions are done through a straightforward
menued text interface.  I think many of the people on this list would
really love it.
To that end, I've uploaded a transcript of me working with the
management console for a test VPS:
http://the-brannons.com/prgmr-session.txt
It's a bit too long to attach to this message.

-- Chris