Psst... Slicehost rocks!
One of the myriad things I do in my spare time (when I'm not working for my old company or my new company is being the webmaster for The Perl Foundation. Socialtext (see also, old company), for quite a while, generously hosted the wikis for TPF on their community box, but since I had done some custom work on the websites I needed to retain root access to the TPF box, so we decided to move the TPF stuff to another hosting service.
Enter Slicehost, a company who seems to have the right answer for unix geeks who want a little piece of the internet that they can mold to do whatever they want. You get root access, they give you the distro you need (Socialtext software likes Ubuntu best so I went with that). They are really awesome and I highly suggest them for anyone wanting just this sort of thing... but... they've got a waiting list. So if you decide you too want to be able to install whatever on your box and play with your favorite tools, you'll need to wait a bit before you can do it.
Other than that, though, they're awesome. I've had nothing but good experiences so far in dealing with them.
Also, it's been a while since I pointed to my corn bread but I fed it to some hapless co-workers today and they were all aswoon, so I thought I should point it out again. The world's best cornbread. Seriously.
