Thanks everyone for the replies. It sounds like there's something of a market gap in the space between DIY/hobbyist-level hosting and enterprise-class managed services.
Torben, I like the idea of a global alliance to address this need, and I would be interested in participating. I will have to think about that one a bit.
Don, I'm in Los Angeles, and I had a server in one of the big data centers downtown. I spent some time setting it up to be secured and stable, and at first it was running fine without much intervention. Then I had my first security incident.
I was told that my server had consumed a couple hundred dollars worth of extra bandwidth, but it wasn't from any of the sites or services I had running. I still don't know what happened, although I eventually concluded that someone may have actually physically plugged into my port and hijacked my bandwidth. Fortunately they decided not to charge me for the overage. But I had spent an enormous amount of time investigating the issue and subsequently monitoring traffic and bandwidth consumption.
All along I felt like I wasn't properly maintaining the box, because I didn't have time. Out of necessity I was following the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" management philosophy, and it felt pretty risky.
Mike, I don't think I'm quite in your price range yet, although it may come to that. I guess I'm hoping to find more of an SMB (small to medium-sized business)-class alternative. So far my sites are pretty low-traffic/bandwidth, but they need better performance and reliability than I've been getting. Are your services/prices based on dedicated servers?
Does anyone have experience running on ODSOL's VPS service? I'm not familiar with virtual server environments, so I'm not sure if the RAM/CPU allocations are adequate for a production OACS site.
