So is it common these days for a web hosting company to not give you SSH access, but instead have you do all administration via web-based control pannel stuff?

Yes. I've had a few accounts where I had to request (and cursorily justify) the SSH. Always got it, though.

I wouldn't use an account if I didn't have SSH, even if I had to pay extra.

I've never had an account where it was an extra charge. They just didn't grant is as default.

So is it common these days for a web hosting company to not give you SSH access, but instead have you do all administration via web-based control pannel stuff?

Yep. I dropped a hosting provider because they refused to give it to me. The CS rep told me they'd lost a lot of customers becasue of the policy, but they were standing firm.

Anyone around who'd like to take a look at a website and give some opinions on layout, appeal, professionalism, etc.? My brother's fiancee's site - [link]

Um, don't worry about critiquing the text...

Thanks!

I like it. It's simple, uncluttered and has pretty girls! The only thing that made me think it could be more professional was that some of the border lines, especially around the drawing at the top, were not as clean as they could be. (I know nothing about web design)

I would recommend having the main menu bar near the top of every page, not just the main page. Use a different color text and star for the page you are currently on.

if a girl was thinking about ditching Windows on her Dell laptop and installing Ubuntu, what steps would she need to take? Obviously there's the backing up of all her stuff on her computer, and trying to retain all the 20 gigs (gulp) of music and the browser stuff. Does anyone have suggestions from doing it before, or a guide for switching your machines over? Does iTunes have a linux version?

The last question first, there is no iTunes for Linux and IMO if iTunes is something that is used all the time then Linux may not the OS to use. That said, there is a way. The Windows version of iTunes can run on Linux but I don't use iTunes so I've never tried it. A product call "Crossover Office" should make the process relativity easy although it probably can be done without it. I have no idea of how of a problem it is to move iTunes music from computer to computer which is essentially what one would be doing. You might be able to use Parallels or VMWare to do it too, but than means installing Windows for the virtual machine so I don't like that approach.

As far as the steps go, you'd want to boot Ubuntu off a CD-ROM and see if things work. Wireless networking can be trick because the vendors of wireless devices tend not to make drivers available for Linux and they are harder for the genius Linux elves to create drivers for. If wireless networking doesn't work off the bat, there are things that can be done to get it working, but if she doesn't want to mess around with it then it might be best to avoid. Wireless is getting better all the time, but depending on the hardware it is an area of caution.

Okay, as I was reading the Ubuntu documentation, it seems that I do not have a disk management utility of any kind, which the documentation tells me I should use under certain circumstances. What should I do to fix that?

I've never read the documentation so I have no idea what they are talking about. The only disk utility I run is fsck (file system check) which gets run every time the computer boot. There is a partition manager GParted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/) you might use if you wanted to resize partitions or something but I don't know what if that is what they mean.