After several hears calling Dreamhost the home for my website, I've moved the site to HotDrupal.com, a web hosting firm that specializes in Drupal hosting. So far, so good.
My main reasons for the move were:
Dreamhost throttled its web server to the point that my site was no longer able to run without throwing errors on 3/4 of logged-in pageviews, which caused rather horrid problems including causing most of the pages to stop work & menus disappear.
In the UNIXy (UNIX, BSD, Linux, OSX) world secure file transfers have been the norm for years, thanks in part to the standardization of SSH as the security protocol due to both its simplicity and power. Windows, on the other hand, has never featured security as a very important feature, evidenced by the ellaborate routes someone must take to handle SSL in IIS.
A handy little one - a backup script for RimuHosting that will backup your Rails app and copy it to the provided backup storage account. To use it you first have to add Geoffrey Grosenbach's backup.rake script to your lib/tasks directory, then sign up for RimuHosting's backup service, then just save out this script as e.g. "backup.sh" and add it to your crontab.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an open standard that aims to help prevent spam, and stop legitimate email from being tagged as such. While the specifications can take some time to understand, there are some web-based tools to help you make creating your SPF records a little easier than by hand, but I still find them to be a bit misleading. According to the SPF FAQ the simplest way to create your SPF record is to simply list the IP addresses of all servers that mail goes out through, e.g.: