vps hosts & setup

I’ve been doing a lot of research lately into hosting Rails apps on Virtual Machines and just who to do that with as a hosting provider etc. I’ve setup a couple with Media Temple which is pretty easy since they have the new Plesk control panel for easy setup and management. However with MT they only offer CentOS 4 and some of the commands we are used to in a default CentOS installation are missing. In particular YUM must be compiled from source and I had a heck of a time setting up Java. It took some crazy startup options that I’ve never had to use before to get the JVM to run without throwing a fit. So in my quest to find the right hosting provider I’ve come across slicehost.com. They cater to the developer community with some great forums, chats, & blogs. They offer Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, and Fedora distros for your VM at some incredible prices. Also you can find some great tutorials on how to configure your VM at usefuljaja.com.