Shell User Experiences?

Hi all!

I'm wondering if DreamHost is the right host for me. I'm a slightly different sort of user. Yeah, I have a website I wanted hosted, of course. But what I'm *primarily* looking for is a *Shell Account*, where I can have my homedir-away-from-home and read my email via command line interface.

So is anyone here using DH that way? I've talked to a couple of DH customers who have said they have good experience with shell accounts here, but they haven't been exercising them too thoroughly. I'm not sure any of them are using CLI email programs here.

On one hand, I'm not looking for anything all that fancy, and certainly nothing evil. (I'm not an IRC user and I don't have daemons I want to run or anything. Maybe a nightly cron job.)

On the other hand, I am going to want to have my shell configuration just so -- I've got thousands of lines of dotfiles (mostly .procmailrcs, cuz I'm an email addict. :) and I'm going to want to spend hours upon hours at a time connected, running emacs.

The TOS says "The customer agrees to make use of DreamHost Web Hosting servers primarily for the purpose of hosting a website, and associated email functions." Would my intended usage fit with what DH is OK with? The TOS goes on to say that they don't want anyone hogging processing power. That's certainly fair enough, but I don't have a sense whether my hanging out, reading and writing email, developing (e.g. writing CGIs for my website), etc. is considered OK usage.

For such precision on TOS you should contact the support.

But i see some peoples connected on shell since days...

I've had all-day SSH connections to check mail via Mutt while at work and never had a problem. There's no auto-logout or anything like that.

But I think I speak for everyone you're sharing a server with when I ask you to please not develop code on a production server. That's not what they're for. Set up a local development environment or get a VPS.

i was happy enough with the support and all the toys (sorry, tools) dh gave me when i joined in '05 to send off a thank you which went something like:

. . . blah blah blah . . but the topper was getting something i never expected to (easily) get fm a host anymore: my old friend the unix shell! i may have to putty in a few times a day to do nothing more than gaze at the prompt to reinforce the reality of it.

so i'm with ya ... having the shell is sweet. gui tools have their place, but sometimes you just can't beat the nitty grittiness of the shell & a few filters bruthah.

Yeah, I originally didn't think getting shell access was such a big deal with all the one-click install stuff and the availability of web-based tools ftp tools and all, but after being here at DreamHost for a while I realized that shell access is a must for me now - and it doesn't seem to me that there aren't that many *good* choices for out there in DreamHost's price range and with their track record.