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For those thinking that CIHost sounds like some insane overlitigous company that tries to use lawsuits to make its profit... You're right. :)

I spend some time at WebHostingTalk.com (a huge forum site for web hosting), and they have a horrible reputation. Actually, you can't search for "CIHost" -- it's banned, apparently due to WHT itself being threatened with legal actions because of posts about CIHost in the forums. But I've read some posts about "See Eye Host" and such. :) You can play with the search and creative misspellings, and you'll find a lot of posts about them.

Your best bet is to use a web host. Companies such as Server Beach(advertising on slashdot) or Rack Shack offer you ridiculous amounts of bandwidth for $99 a month. If you need a less "dirtier" approach to hosting you can go with companies such as RackSpace. These companies allow you to change your bandwidth requirements monthly. So if you know your going to be releasing a new version of your software next week you can get them to up the bandwidth for that month. If you go over your allocation most hosts will charge you at a set rate which is decided before you join the host. The later sort of hosts can offer you load balancing so that you can manage your CPU time etc. You can find hosts like these on some of the many web host directory sites such as http://www.webhostdir.com or http://www.tophosts.com. To find out what others have to say about them, you can look through some of the many forums such as http://forums.webhostdir.com or http://www.webhostingtalk.com. The forums often give you an idea of any problems customers faced with hosts and would be able to provide you with more options than you would get here. Getting an expert to manage your hosting is often better. They have multiple data lines in to their data centers, power generators if the power goes down, and so much more to help keep your site serving your customers. At the end of the day the benefits offered by professional hosts gives you much more value for money than buying and managing your own boxes but if you must do it yourself, I think the general rule of thumb is to keep your line uner 75% of capacity at all times. There must be a network nerd who can confirm that for me.

The canonical discussion forum for this topic is WebHostingTalk.

Another place to get some opinions is the Webhostingtalk forums...

Some of the things you're asking for:

• PHP,
• MySQL,
• raw log files,
• FTP,
• decent bandwidth (~10 GB),
• around 300 MB disk space

Are available from almost any host. The competition out there is fierce and I wouldn't be surprised if you could get this for $12/year. But for that price I'd expect pretty hit and miss service (get two plans at different providers, copy data between and plan and keep control over your DNS if you need to switch!)

Some of the other requirements you requested will probably 'bump you up' a hosting level:

• the ability to configure my server somewhat (htpasswd, htaccess),
• crontab,
• SSH,
• POP accounts,

Most semi-decent shared plans will have those features.

Also, you may want to consider a Virtual Private Server. The host server will run several VPSs. Each VPS will get its own IP, memory and will share disk IO and bandwidth. You would get root access with the ability to install your own software, compile your own code, set up cron tabs, init tabs, etc.

There are a few companies that are offering VPS services now, including my own, Rimu Hosting. And our VPS plans start from $29/month.

Whatever you do, A good place to do some research on this is Webhostingtalk.com They have a 'requests' forum that you can post your requirements in and people will reply with offers. You can check the posters profiles and search for meantion of their outfits on the forums to guage how reliable they are. BTW: WHT is owned by Rackshack IIRC (And if you're after dedicated server hosting Rackshack is pretty decent).

You go to that page, type in which site you want to visit, and you're off to that site, and off the company's squid radar. At school, I use it every day to read forbidden bulletin boards that are blocked by the school's squid-based proxy.

Also, the WebHostingTalk forums have a dedicated forum subsection for having companies compete over you... it was somewhat amusing when I did so. I got like 5 responses within an hour, plus 5 or so e-mails. But then I realized that the bandwidth I'd require was much greater than I anticipated (or could afford), so I edited my post saying something like that. And they're still e-mailing me. Like once a week...

but, Webhostingtalk's website is basically a forum with user reviews, recommendations, and gripes dedicated to exactly the questions you seek answers too ;)

Head over to www.webhostingtalk.com and post your question there. I am sure you will get some good input.

Service levels come in three flavors.

Managed server - Server is provided and maintained by the hosting company in question. You may or may not have root access.
Dedicated server - Server is provided, but the level of administration provided by the hosting company should be discussed. Unless requested, I would expect NO interference from the hosting company. You should always have root access.
Colocated server - Same as above, except the customer provides the server too.

Updates and patches are usually (maybe not usually? it's usual for where I work, Site5, atleast) by the hosting company anyway, without a charge.

Some things are charged for, and should be - But just keeping a system up to date (which will also keep 90% of the script kiddies at bay - I'm not implying an uptodate system is a secure system, however) should be standard practise at all hosting providers.

What happened with CommuniTech, under any other circumstances, I would put down to miscomunication - As in, the host thought that the client wanted to handle things themselves. But CommuniTech have what I wouldn't call the best reputation. :)
Search for CommuniTech at Webhosting talk, and you'll see what I mean.