I signed up with Media Temple(MT) hosting last month in hopes of more features from my hosting company, fortunately I didn't move more than a couple of domains over to (MT) and I'm especially happy that I didn't cancel my Hostgator account.
 
I needed shell access to allow for Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications to be installed, and managed properly. Hostgator charges $10 per additional domain that requires shell access beyond your primary domain via their shared reseller hosting, which I think is a total crock(pardon the pun) of shit beings that it's a simple check of a box to enable. They tell me I can pass it on to my clients for $15! 
 
To no avail there was another apparent issue with (MT) that wasn't realized until after spending half a month with them. I loved the administration of the GridServer package I signed up for other than the file manager portion. the lack of functionality forced me to learn more shell commands which wasn't an entire loss other than the fact that I'm going to have to pay extra via Hostgator to utilize my newly developed skills.
 
The issues was the fact that they require you to pay $20 extra for a "Rails Container" which is a clever way of saying screw you if yo want to use Rails we are going to charge you extra because we think we can.
 
BULLSHIT!
 
I could see if I had to scale up to a Twitter type Rails application, that would warrant having to purchase a separate container as they so dubbed it, which would allow for a more resource heavy application, but to do the simple messing around that I was looking for is simply ridiculous to say the least.
 
This brought me back to Hostgator which required the move of TheNeedhams.us which is my family website project, and this site as well so here we are back to square one with no shell access. I'm planning on changing that very soon as I'm looking into purchasing a dedicated server from Hostgator. With this I can do what ever the hell I want without restrictions, and shell access for what ever I want as I will have root access.
 
Let's see what else was this post about?
 
Oh yeah just building sites in general. I'm a Drupal fanatic on a hobby level with regards to my personal interests and what I use as a platform for my own business, and personal website. But I also love talking about Drupal, and spreading the love via IRC #Drupal-Support on the freenode.net network. 
 
Recently I've actually been contributing my knowledge to the community if I can, and it's actually helping me become more educated about Drupal which is a wonderful thing.
 
Alright that's all for now, but feel free to check out my latest websites I've setup, http://iPhoneAppRiches.com and http://AppVenturesLLC.com until next time.
Sincerely,
Joshua Needham