I've signed up for an account with linode as my new well-connected box. It's pretty amazing. Like my old sru account, I have full root access to an entire machine. But in this case, the "machine" is completely virtual. It's a UML (User Mode Linux) instance running on some big-ass blade server somewhere. I can used their web UI to slice and dice my "disk" space into whatever chunks I want, put various filesystems and Linux distros on whatever chunks, and put them all together into a "machine" that I can halt and boot on a whim, and get keyed ssh access to it's "console", as well as normal `net access into it when it's running

Plus it's better connected to the `net at large, the backup is complete, intrinsic, invisible, and automatic (due to the virtual nature of the "disk"), AND it's cheaper to boot.

The folks at sru have agreed to ship me the disk out of the old machine I was leasing, so I can recover my own home dir from it, and after I do, I will be shaking their dust from my feet.