First shop I worked at in 1998 was hosting dozens of websites using all BSDi —-it was the first thing I really managed as a sysadmin. Such a pleasure to run! Ev

First shop I worked at in 1998 was hosting dozens of websites using all BSDi —-it was the first thing I really managed as a sysadmin. Such a pleasure to run! Everything very sanely laid out, it was easy to compile the extra tools we needed, the serial consoles were trivial to set up without extra boards, and provided the hardware was good it was stable as hell. The only downside was the lack of certain tools: we had a single Sun box for running Oracle and ColdFusion, for instance. I was sad when we were bought and the new owners converted everything to other platforms. Seems like today, given the proclivity of open-source/non-platform-locked tooling, someone would be looking at making that a viable solution for boutique design-plus-hosting. But maybe those days are gone.