[dejb]

> There are many of us who prefer the command line, though.

I prefer it too. But I never realised how much work setting up the LAMP stack could be. I must admit I was trying to set it up with php4 for a legacy system so that probable made it harder than it needed to be. I recon a default LAMP install would be a good option. But I can understand the motivations for wanting to scare off the cpanel crowd who will most likely demand 'managed server' type support and then badmouth you for not providing it.

Apart from automating provisioning you should have an automatic payment option as well. I'm sure most hosts would have a large number of 'sleeper' customers who can't be bothered to get around to cancelling their account even though they don't really need it. So apart from the time saved with chasing payments, you'd have more customers who use little or no resources. Kind of like I might end up being. Now I've got to go and pay your most recent invoice.

[lsc]

supporting legacy systems can be a huge amount of work. If you use whatever all the kids are using, setting up a LAMP system is trivial... seriously, apt-get install php5 should get you something that works in 90% of the cases, and it will be done before you have time to get a cup of coffee.

But yeah. once you want something weird, well, then you've spent the afternoon recompiling source packages and tracking down security patches for obsolete libraries, or dicking around with some half-broken poorly-maintained third party repos. I mean, it's not that hard, if you have experience with autoconf and compiling stuff, but even so it's a few hours of dicking around, and after you are done, you feel like a moron 'cause you just spent three hours installing php. (granted, there may be a good repo with a well-maintained php4 package out there somewhere, but I'm paranoid, and generally am slow to trust 3rd party repos.)

but then, php4 doesn't seem like it should be that weird. In fact, it should be just like apt-get install php4, but I just tried it and it doesn't work.

E: Package php4 has no installation candidate

so yeah. this is part of why I hate languages like python that aggressively break things that used to work when you upgrade. From what I remember of janitoring php, running php4 code on php5 usually worked just fine, though.

[lsc]

heh. Yeah. well, my billing system is in no shape to do any sort of 'pull' based billing. using paypal helps keeps me out of a dreamhost-style billing disaster where I bill everyone for the next year all at once.

I will set something up with paypal recurring payments, though, for those who want it. But I like to think that the people using my service are getting something out of it, you know?