After several weeks of researching, and one canceled web hosting service, I've finally settled in at a new home. I previously had web hosting through a friend's company in the CRC, but web hosting is not their primary business and there was some PHP functionality I wanted that wasn't installed on their web servers.
DreamHost ended up being the winner in my new web host sweepstakes for several reasons.
First and foremost, they offer all the features that I was looking for: the basic PHP, CGI, Ruby, etc. packages; my own set of MySQL databases; and shell access via SSH. I am still surprised at how many of the web hosts I looked at didn't offer anything SSH! I spend most of my day at a shell prompt as it is, and I don't want to be stuck with a combination of FTP access and a lame web interface, which is all that most providers seem to offer.
I was also struck by how similar the culture at DreamHost seems to be to what we have here at Webmail. Just look at their main page and they've got their support forums, blog entries, and system status updates all right there. There's no such thing as an outage-free IT company of any kind. The fact that they aren't afraid to admit that is awesome.
Finally, though really least important as far as I'm concerned, is their referral program. It turns out DreamHost rewards their customers for referring new customers. This is done through a $97 referral bonus and a 10% payout on future renewal payments that one's referrals make. So, if anyone happens to read this and be looking for a web host, check out DreamHost and use the referral code NUCLEARMAXDONKEY. It's setup to give $97 off the cost of signup instead of giving me the $97 bonus. I'm just a nice guy like that :)
As for Movable Type, it's a grand blog software and installation was a snap. It's actually the same software we use to run the Webmail Blog, so it'll be nice to work in the same back-end interface I've used before. One of my goals for next quarter is going to be blog-related, so here's to a long and fruitful relationship with Movable Type. Just need to find a nice layout, or make one using this handy tool I found while poking around on Google.
This is Jon signing off...