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You could get a cheap hosting account that offers SSH and open a SOCKS tunnel on your machine or router and point your browser at that. DNS will be resolved on your hosting company's server (for SOCKS 4a and 5), and everything will be encrypted until it leaves the hosting company's server, at which point it will about as secure as any other wired connection (which is to say, not at all to the determined cracker). You also get the benefit of the static IP address and ability to run mail and web servers. Check here and here and here for some ways of keeping your tunnels persistent under *nix and win32, and look at unixshell# or JVDS for hosting plans. I've used them both, and they both seem pretty good.

When I stepped up from shared hosting to a virtual plan I looked at two providers.
Tecktonic.net and JVDS.com. Ended up going with tektonic, and have been pretty happy with them. Support is top-notch and they use Virtuozzo instead UML.

Posting way too late here, but for bsd4me:

Have you considered one of the user mode linux hosts like JVDS?

They have BSD as well as Linux, and you're in complete control for about the same price as a space/bandwidth-equivalent shared hosting setup.

The BSD machines obviously don't run um-Linux, but the equivalent mode of BSD that apparently works very well and has been around a long time.

I've been using them for a while to host a bunch of small websites. I don't know how PHP performs in that environment, but I've been super happy with Perl/apache2/PostgreSQL, all set up *exactly* the way I want them because of course I'm root.

I was really surprised how good the performance is even with the relatively small CPU share.

The reason there are few free ones is because people abused them. Just go buy a cheap shell somewhere like QuadSpeed Internet. $3 a month. JVDS offers a limited free shell, but as they put in the big print, no IRC.

It's really the future of "shared" webhosting because it balances the power of a full server against the cost of a shared one. Some hosts like JVDS and RimuHosting are already doing this and it's great.

IMHO, BSD's jail() is one of the more interesting developments in recent versions -- at least for an internet service provider.

For those of you unfamiliar, check it out. It's very much like User Mode Linux and allows running virtual servers within a larger server. Many colocation/virtual server providers (e.g. take, your, pick) use FreeBSD jails to provide low-cost root-access hosts for customers. This really has revolutionized cost effectiveness of large scale hosting!

There have been various limitations with FreeBSD jails when they first appeared. There were glitches with information leaking across jails. There's a limit to a single IP address, inability to do raw socket operations or even ping/traceroute, and some glitches with a couple system calls used by major applications like Postfix.

But my understanding is that 5.x seriously improves jail support, especially from a resource efficiency perspective. One of my BSD developer buddies also tells me that he's fixing raw socket support. Keep an eye on the jail feature...

I've been looking at various offerings for a virtual server, and 50 dollars is WAY off the mark. They are out there in the 15 to 20 dollar range, and if you are only doing low volume mail, a tiny vds can be had for $12.50 a month. No, I have no affiliation with the folks on the end of that link, other than I've been considering using it for just that, fixed ip low volume mail server that's 'in the data center' instead of 'on the cable ip'. It looks like a cost effective way to get around the hassles, and, it's cheaper than upgrading to a fixed ip with my cable provider.

For a dedicated server, look at Server Beach for a cheap (about $100/mo) server. The only support you get is rebooting and reinstalling, the ToS are no-nonsense strict, but the box is yours, the price is wonderful, and the bandwidth is mind-blowing.

For a cheap virtual dedicated server, I absolutely cannot speak highly enough of JVDS.com. They use User Mode Linux to host whichever Linux distribution you like. Uptime is excellent, Rus (the guy running it) is very attentive to security, and you can choose from several locations if you have a geographic preference for the server. Most of the machines are hosted with Jipes or Cogent-class bandwidth providers which has sometimes meant brief outages in the past. I haven't had recent problems, but it's been a few minutes every couple of weeks in the past. For $20.00/mo for root, that's easily forgiven.

The down side to both is that neither are paying me for their goddamned licenses, so I'm going to sue all the customers blind as soon as I figure out how to go after JVDS' FreeBSD users too.

~Darl

I'm in the process of moving my sites to JVDS as we speak. My current host is good, but they can't beat JVDS's cost. I also like that JVDS gives you a choice of either a popular Linux distros (Gentoo, Slackware, Redhat, Fedora, Debian, Suse, Mandrake) or FreeBSD, and donates part of your payment to either FreeBSD or Debian, based on your distro choice.

I'm in the process of moving my sites to JVDS as we speak. My current host is good, but they can't beat JVDS's cost. I also like that JVDS gives you a choice of either a popular Linux distros (Gentoo, Slackware, Redhat, Fedora, Debian, Suse, Mandrake) or FreeBSD, and donates part of your payment to either FreeBSD or Debian, based on your distro choice.

I'm using JVDS right now and am reasonably pleased. Occasional unexplained reboots (also explained security reboots) aside, their speeds and prices are good.

You should definitely take a look at webhostingtalk.com and read what others are saying about various VPSes. It's how I found JVDS, and a lot of newer (read: potentially flakier) startups offer incredible early-signup bonuses to forum members.

Mirror here

Its very managment speak with a few differenet coloured tux's

Rus

That would basically be the end of P2P networks: without any fast uplinks, P2P traffic would be starved down to dial-up speeds.

For once the bloated MS .doc file format serves us well. Joe Sixpack wants to be able to put his 3 megapixel photographs of his kids in a word doc and email them to Mom.

And, even if home connections get throttled, virtual hosting and dedicated server prices are plummetting.

This particular genie is not going back in the bottle (though they are attacking on many fronts).

I would also like to point out our companies donation scheme at JVDS.com

Rus