Have been reading nice things about slicehost. My need was no good panel ui or one click installer and just wanted ssh access and woot! I have root @slicehost. Betting just $20 for all I am reading is OK. And wow! I got karmic installation in just few steps. Next I configured my ssh config file to easily bypass rewriting username@ip. And fewshh, I can get started with slicehost now. My server is based in San Antonio, so I was little worried about network latency.
I then did a tracepath for ip assigned to me. It took 19 hops to reach the destination, 6th hop being in US. Avg ping time was 278 ms.
I did cross checking for what they committed. Doing “df –h” command confirmed me that I have 10G space on /dev/sda1, 240M RAM and 5G swap (which I found using “free” command).
Running “cat /proc/cpuinfo” confirmed that I have been given Quad Core AMD Opteron 2.2 MHz Processor with a cache size of 512kb.
I added a user parag using “adduser parag” and gave all access  using “visudo” and appended this line “parag ALL=(ALL) ALL” at the end of sudoers config file.
Screen is a very useful utility for me as it helps me performs some runtime tasks even if I am not logged in. So, I installed screen utility and moved on to install LAMP. Below are the steps which I followed:
•    Installed build-essentials using “sudo apt-get install build-essential”
•    Installed PHP5 with Apache using
“sudo apt-get install php5-common php5-dev php5-mysql php5-sqlite php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl php5-cgi php5-mcrypt php5-curl php5-gd php5-memcache php5-mhash php5-pspell php5-snmp php5-sqlite libmagick9-dev php5-cli apache2 libapache2-mod-php5”
•    Installed MySQL using
“sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client libmysqlclient15-dev”
•    Read some where to fix imagick before starting. Did that too using “sudo apt-get install make php-pear” and then configuring using “sudo pecl install imagick”
Quite satisfied with machine till now and would say good value for money.