Just got through moving our development site to a slicehost server. Tried to install wordpress, frustration ensued. The homepage loaded fine, but none of the links worked. This really confused me until I turned pretty permalinks off and found that I could get to posts and pages (but not Buddypress modules).
We tracked it down to a failure of the mod_rewrite engine. If you’re having a similar problem, it looks like there’s a few reasons mod rewritten url’s might fail (ctrl – f “Fixing other issues”).
Our problem was allowoverride needed to be set to “all” and not “none.” This is done in httpd.config. You’ll probably need some kind of root access to edit this file.
If you have a managed server, this probably won’t be an issue because someone will have set this up for you.
UPDATE: we might not use Slicehost, it seems like too much can go wrong and we don’t have a dedicated system admin.