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If you're looking to spend less, virtual private servers are the way to go. I've used two hosts and have been pretty impressed with both.

Slicehost will give you a virtual box (root access, choice of distro) with decent specs for about $20/month.
TekTonic.net (whom I found through www.unixshell.com) gives you an unmanaged virtual host for $15/month.

Again, I've used both and have been very happy with the services. Bandwidth hasn't been an issue, uptime and performance have been great.

The true geek runs his own mail server.

Haa..! Until the ISP decides to block traffic to/from your port 25.

That annoyance only comes into play for outbound mail. I'd like to see Cox try keeping my mail from arriving here...that'd be amusing to watch.

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.

Seems odd that Novell would "Fire Back." Unix Shell, where I host my server, has had no end of troubles with Xen.

the message on the front page of Unix Shell "Due to lack of Datacenter space, unixshell# has suspended ordering until further notice" is not entirely accurate. If you read the forums, they are waiting until Xen is stable enough to be able to deploy further accounts.

In fairness to unixshell#, they are offering to migrate servers to their sister company, and they seem to be very forthcoming about the status of their servers. It seems that they are experiencing *occasional* lock-ups and reboots. Some people don't care, others do, and have left. They are actually out of space. It seems that they ordered another server, and were told that there no room by the data center. No warning at all. There are some other public incidents involving the data center's service and unixshell# seems to be reconsidering their choice of data centers. They appear, also, to not be worried about expanding until the Xen bugs are fixed. I don't blame them, more buggy servers means more headaches for the admins.

I just wanted to offer a counter opinion, both Xen and unixshell# have operated above my expectations so far. Xen is a relatively new technology, I expect there may be some hiccups here and there. Until now, I have been fairly lucky.

widesan:/$ uptime
  16:52:04 up 89 days, 8:58, 2 users, load average: 0.09, 0.04, 0.01

Seems odd that Novell would "Fire Back." Unix Shell, where I host my server, has had no end of troubles with Xen. Personally, I have been mostly stable, and the Xen technology is an awesome thing. However, the message on the front page of Unix Shell "Due to lack of Datacenter space, unixshell# has suspended ordering until further notice" is not entirely accurate. If you read the forums, they are waiting until Xen is stable enough to be able to deploy further accounts.

That sounds like a great idea, but how can all that be accomplished without a noticeable performance decrease of nearly everything a user runs inside the guest OS?

It depends on the approach you take to virtualization. Xen offers near-native performance, but it requires specially-modified versions of the guest OS (not a problem for Linux, but it keeps Windows from running). VMware imposes more of a performance penalty, but it can virtualize a closed-source OS such as Windows or OS/2.

For a practical data point, I run my web/mail server on a Xen-based VM hosted by these guys. I've not noticed any performance problems with the apps I'm running--djbdns, qmail, courier-imapd, Apache, TWiki.

lets see... for a year of 200gigs, that's $360 USD. couldn't I jut buy a new hard drive every year or burn hundreds of DVDs for far far less?

Yes, and then you'd have a lot of storage in the same place as your existing storage. A theft or a fire and your data's gone. Unless you carefully schlep the DVDs elsewhere and keep them up to date. Which most people never do.

A better comparison is getting a collocated server and using it for backups. Given that people are charging $360 a year for a modest slice of a virtual server with only 12 GB of disk, Amazon's price seems pretty decent.

And it's a smart use of Amazon's brand. People are very conservative with backups. I would never use a startup to host my critical data, as there's no reason to trust them. Amazon, though, won't just close up shop one night because the bank account is empty.

People happily pay $30 bucks a month for physical storage; there's no reason they won't pay for virtual storage, too.

0) stop running your webserver on your frakking DSL : unixshell is sweet for this (Linnode alike with 5x better plans).
1) dont ever do anything interesting
2) do something so interesting slashdot will never publish it
3) run lighttpd and back off your useless CGI

I was looking for a Linux Virtual Host, blah, blah.

Stumbed apon these pretty pictures (near bottom of page) .

Curious, I thought, what happened to Level(3) ? I though for a second because perhaps unixshell had a peering with those people that Level(3) were in dispute with.

Nope, just one of those regular outages that make the 99.999% promises sound a little over done.

Hardcore geek here, with a UID that's far lower than yours.

You're allegedly a hardcore geek, but you're whining about the fact that people on consumer-grade internet connections are treated like consumers?

Really, if you want to get treated like the big swinging dick you apparently think you are, you should probably get a real internet connection. Go get yourself a T1 or a colocated server. Or both. Christ, I know people who get hundred-megabit pipes for their hobby projects; if you can't afford the few hundred bucks a month for a home T1, or the $70 bucks a month for a real ISP's DSL, then you should scrape together the $20 per month for a fractional colocated server and run your own mailserver.

Otherwise we may have to take away your ridiculously low UID and give it to somebody more deserving.