Just some history: Shared servers have firewalls that prevent connections coming in from the outside via anything other than accepted methods such as http, https, or ftp. You can get around this using tunneling, but PianoMan is trying to avoid needing to do that by moving to a server that will let him open up the firewall. Anybody know of a cloud server who does that?

Yes please keep us posted, many of us would be interested in this. For what it's worth though I have tried a number of different times to find a hosted type service, I was under the impression that using a third party service would be simpler than anything else.

I have found that setting up my own machine and "hanging it" on the web is actually easier and less frustrating than dealing with the server hosting service. Sesame is really very friendly to set up and run with your own web server. Following the documentation that is posted on the Lantica site made set up a breeze.

I am not crazy about dealing with maintaining my own server, but it is less of hassle then it was working with Covad and a few other hosted server providers like soft layer.

Perhaps Lantica might consider setting up a cloud server to serve its Sesame population?

FYI: I contacted Hostmonster and had them whitelist two ports for me for TCP, incoming and outgoing. I was then able to start a Sesame Server on those ports and connect directly to it with an offline Sesame Client. Obviously, it's a security hole, but it is easily doable.