[mdlug] Looking for Shell Accounts

[Wojtak, Greg]

On 2011-07-08 8:57 AM, "Brandon F" <bfotiu at gmail.com> wrote:

>Hello everyone,
>
>First of all I want to say hello to everyone again, I'm a longtime reader
>but first time poster.
>
>I manage a small BPO team and a couple of my members want to expand their
>skills beyond Level 1.  I've been recommending Linux to them based on my
>appreciation for the toolset and the opportunity it can give them to get
>out
>of helpdesk hell.  So far we've all been studying for the first two Linux
>Professionals Institute certification tests but while I have a few working
>systems, my people are pretty green.
>
>Can anyone recommend a good place to buy shell access so they can get
>their
>hands dirty and dig into a system with little consequence?  I'm thinking
>bare bones Ubuntu (that's what they're learning at ITT) with just a BASH
>shell and they can get Apache, PHP, etc installed from there.  Also I'm
>looking for a place where they can take snapshots and easily restore if
>they
>seriously break anything.  I did this a few years back and it helped me
>tremendously but I wasn't able to choose the distro and had to go through
>an
>intermediary for any high level issues.
>
>The only other thing is price.  Something with >5GB of space and no more
>than $15 a month would be ideal.

My best advice would be to have them download VirtualBox and install some
distro 
in a virtual machine.  That way you have more control over your snapshots,
backups, and it's all local.  On top of that, it is free.