Suggestions for hosts who support Python welcome. - Jason Shellen

Which product? Mosso? Slicehost? Or their Managed hosting? Is it the installation aspect they're not supporting? - Mark Trapp

Mark - This is with their dedicated managed servers. We have been happy Slicehost customers for our staging environment pre-acquisition. - Jason Shellen

Jason, that's interesting: we've been able to install all manner of custom software, including newer versions of Python, on our dedicated managed servers. We had to compile and install the software ourselves, but it didn't void things like managed support or managed backup. The packages they use are tied to the version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux they run, which always sacrifices newness for stability. - Mark Trapp

This has been a good lesson about setting a user's expectations since it seems reasonable for the claim of "fanatical" support to include some guidance in supporting a user's desire to work with a nearly year-old upgrade to a popular language. (The RHEL support tools could run alongside an installation of 2.6, for example, and dependency conflicts of new modules could be resolved by the Rackspace team.) - Chris Wetherell

That's weird. We are also able to install/upgrade anything we want on our Slices. What do you mean by support? - Chip Ramsey

To clear up any confusion we use Slicehost and Rackspace. The problem is not with our Slice. It's with Python (and for that matter Rails and Java) not being "supported platforms". :( - Jason Shellen

Jason: I am working on getting you an answer, sorry about this. - Robert Scoble

Thank you Robert. - Jason Shellen

This really seems like Redhat dropping the ball -- http://serverfault.com/questio... and http://serverfault.com/questio... / Can't you escalate this to "yell at Redhat" instead of "yell at Rackspace"? Would be useful for all of us then! - Michael Herf

@herf Good point on the root cause, but Red Hat never offered us excellent support so I feel that I should better engage with those that *did*. e.g. Rackspace. Also, I'm of such a weird temperament that I seem to prefer the "not yelling" and "more asking" options, if available. My yelling sounds like a fiercely mad Eeyore, which no one takes seriously. - Chris Wetherell