[ TL;DR: koding.com/R/danmbox (4GB with referral, 3 GB without it) ] koding.com is giving out free Linux VMs with root access and web development tools (PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby). Looks like visitors have to confirm that you're not a spammer / phisher once per hour per visitor, but other than that supposedly you can host whatever apps you want. They have some pretty good tutorials and there's a community. I don't know how much longer this will last (it's the "last day", but I don't know when the cutoff is). Sorry for not posting the URL as an actual link, but since the target site does some crazy redirects, the forum software prevents me from doing so (and I'm not sure that skipping the redirects has no effect) I don't get anything other than 1 extra G / referral (as anybody else) and I figured it's a good way to start experimenting with Linux web development. I hope this doesn't rub anybody the wrong way.