I’m hooked on Cloud Servers — especially Rackmount’s/Mosso’s Cloud server — where you can have a nice slice of a powerful Linux dedicated server that can host just about any application you want.

Cloud servers such as Mosso’s or Amazon’s AWS are unmanaged virtual instances of Linux OSes running on top of dedicated hardware.  This implies that you have to manage and maintain the software while the hosting company is responsible for the hardware.

Server administration is not too difficult, but configuration is a pain and can take several hours.  But once you have everything configured, backup the image and then you can deploy the Cloud image for your next project in a matter of minutes.

The image backup also gives you a snapshot where if critical upgrade is required, you create the image first, install the patches second.  If something goes wrong, just remount the old image.  This is something very difficult to do if something goes wrong on a dedicated Linux server.