Thanks a lot for your comments. I love seeing anything FreeBSD related on HN these days as it's something I am newly interested in. I too run OS X locally (for years) but have been a Linux guy for as long as I can remember.
Do you have a suggestion on a solid FreeBSD VPS host? I really love Linode for my linux boxes and have been using them for years. That being said, I am very interested in moving towards FreeBSD for my personal servers. I'm so amped to learn more about it.
I have looked in the past for a FreeBSD VPS host but I could never find anything satisfactory or as large as Linode so that I had some semblance of knowledge that my instance wouldn't disappear tomorrow.
One of the big issues I see is that virtualising FreeBSD doesn't always work correctly, last I heard there were issues with FreeBSD and multi-processing on top of Xen for example [2], and there is still no native hypervisor for FreeBSD [1] (I honestly wish they would steal the KVM stuff from OpenIndiana, KVM on Linux absolutely rocks!) and that means you will always be running on top of some other OS or HyperVisor such as KVM, Xen, VirtualBox, and others, so the full stack support for running FreeBSD on top of FreeBSD is still unfortunately out of reach.
[1]: That isn't entirely true, there is a project named BHyVe that is working on this, but I haven't heard/seen any updates since early 2011. Also, it requires that you mask off the memory to be used for virtual machines, unlike KVM and others... See: http://wiki.freebsd.org/BHyVe
[2]: http://www.hungryhacker.com/os/freebsd-on-linode/ (See comment about requesting vcpu's to be set to 1: "Linodes default to vcpus=4, which will choke FreeBSD at the moment. They won’t increase this setting of course, but they will happily lower it for you. Simply give them your Linode # and ask them to reduce vcpus to 1 and they’ll make the change.") Do note that the author used FreeBSD 8.1 so it is entirely possible that the limitation is now removed with FreeBSD 9.0
Do you have a suggestion on a solid FreeBSD VPS host? I really love Linode for my linux boxes and have been using them for years. That being said, I am very interested in moving towards FreeBSD for my personal servers. I'm so amped to learn more about it.