Vincent, are you talking low cost or upscale? I'll assume low cost.
I don't claim to be typical, but IMNSHO the most important thing is
the ability for complete, utter control for the customer via ssh
login. Other value-added services can be very useful, but I would
never trust a manged hosting anything without the fallback to root
access on the (either real or virtual) machine. My take on it is if
the hosting provider isn't good enough to be able to give you that
safely and productively, why would you trust them to be good enough to
make any of their more point and clicky value-added stuff work right?
I haven't used it myself, but
Acorn Hosting's
setup sounds like the best solution for shared server (low cost)
solutions. See the
community
page. (Acorn uses a Linux kernel patch to achieve essentially the
same thing as FreeBSD's jail facility.)
Since I don't think she's doing the hosting for the money, Cathy might
be happy to give you advice, what her users have asked her for, etc.
There are other folks doing OpenACS hosting that also might be happy
to do the same. If you can encourage them to respond here it'd be
interesting to hear what they have to say.
As for the value-added features themselves: Webmail sounds very
useful, and a lot of people seem to want it. Off hand I can't think
of anything else to add to David's list.
