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who would seriously consider ubuntu for a server install?

It's quite popular on RAM constrained VPS's, like these:

http://vpslink.com/vps-hosting/
http://www.vpsville.ca/vps-plans

Debian/Ubuntu clock in at 4-10MB RAM usage, while CentOS is somewhere closer to 30MB.

But I imagine that's only a few thousand installs. Still, Ubuntu is Cloud and VPS ready!

I used VPSLink.com for a while. A VPS is really the way to go if you want to admin your own box. This place is the best I found in much research. They have the top 7 distros to choose from plus they'll pre-install a LAMP or Ruby stack, or a reseller panel. You can be under Xen or OpenVZ. You get to be root. You'll need to keep everything compact enough to run in 256 or 512MB. Probably want to use nginx instead of apache ;)

Amazon EC2 is pretty cool also, but it's not cost effective for continuous hosting. But if you have a spike you can move some of your traffic to an EC2 node (maybe just static content or something) and maintain performance.

--If you're not doing much of anything else on the system, you can get better results with a higher number of simultaneous jobs: ' make -j6 ' for example. Also look into " distcc " to use other PCs while compiling.

http://wiki.vpslink.com/HOWTO:_Install/Configure_Distcc

Well that blows.

I know someone that signed up for with DreamHost last year when they had the $9.99/yr promo one day.

He's been pushing about 3TB per month from his fileserver. :P

Lucky him, I guess?

Even going with a webhost a bit more professional, which won't oversell... like say VPSville or VPSlink, you can get about 1TB of bandwidth for about $60/mo, which comes out to about $0.06/GB.

Plus you get a bunch of beefy VPS's you can use for whatever you want, in addition to the downloading.

Seems like a fine solution to me. VPSville has their own control panel that lets you add more VPS's as needed, and apply an image to them. Setting up another download server when you need it can't be that difficult - although it probably wouldn't work for PSN/XBL stuff.

vpslink will give you a full linux environment of your choice to set up as a mail server (or whatever else your little heart desires) and at $7/mo. You can't beat the value if you want any sort of flexibility/control over your mail.

if you DON'T have the skill/desire to run your own, fastmail.fm, lunarpages.com, or any of a host of others are available. But really, go with google apps. Its simple, it works, its reliable, lots of storage, etc etc.

Unless you're a google hater, then you can pay someone else for what google gives you for free.

...and I'll boost the numbers.

When I last reviewed the Xen VPN farms out there I didn't find any with IPv6. It is on my short list of discriminators, not that I need it now, but I don't want to have to revisit the server to add it in the next couple of years when it is needed.

I should probably add that I don't want to pay more than $10/mo for the server either. I don't need much of a slice. I get by fine on a vpslink level-1 server, though gandi is about to claim my business. 4x the ram, twice the disk, same price.

I assume you're using shared hosting. It's a cheap and easy option, but you give up all control of who is on your server, and what they are doing.
I primarily use VPSes for many reasons including this one. It's a great middle ground between colo and shared hosting, where the host is in charge of giving me hardware and network support, and that is all.
There are many good VPS providers out there. I personally prefer XEN based hosts to OS level virt like OpenVZ that powers most of the market.
http://vpslink.com/xen-vps/ and http://slicehost.com/ are some of the better services I've used, but there's plenty more out there.