Whether you’re looking for a sandbox environment or your own server farm, virtual server solutions like Linode.com or Slicehost offer a great solution.

I’ve been using Linode for 2 months now and I use it primarily as a test environment to increase my Linux knowledge (which I must admit, is very basic). With Ubuntu server installed and apt-get, even my grandmother can get it up & running.

The cool thing about their setup is that you can reinstall any of the main Linux-distro’s with a single click over and over again. Together with their DNS manager that is all you need to start hosting anything.

The downside of services like these is that you have to take care of everything yourself, including backup’s. So for business critical needs, I still trust the world’s most flexible hosting company.

Before I ordered an account, I’ve quickly compared Linode to some competitors (mainly SliceHost) but I couldn’t find a reason to choose for either one of them so I just decided to go for Linode 360 because they had a slightly better offer.

Linode now has a referral system, so if you ever think of getting an account, you may always be so kind to give me a $20 discount: http://www.linode.com/?r=408d1cd9a3c5a16fc3a5202370869dfb8bc78fee