I've just got a Dedicated Server @ LayeredTech, good Bandwidth and a decent setup time ( pre sales response over their email contact is rather slow... ). Lots of people have good things to say about them. But the main reason I went with them is that they have donated a server to the centos project ( that runs behind http://mirror.centos.org/ rrdns pools ), and we have been very happy with it.

First thing to keep in mind : they replace the standard yum.conf with their own 'customised version'. Which is fine. Till I realised they have removed the gpg key check for packages, and added in some third party mirrors. This is plain stupid.

Firstly, using third party mirrors might expose you to package poison, and the only way to check that is using the gpg key on the packages itself - which has been disabled. So the you should immediately add this line to the /etc/yum.conf file in the [main] section:

gpg-check=1

Secondly, they dont install anything on the machines - its just a plain jane stock install with no content services or daemons installed. Excellent option if you know what you are doing. If you dont know CentOS too well - go to one of their Resellers, who pre-install and support a Control Panel like cPanel and DirectAdmin etc.

me ? I think ssh + vim is all the control panel anyone ever needs :)

--
Karanbir Singh { http://www.karan.org/ }

[Music : Natalia Imbruglia - Starting Today ]