<< I, and several others here, recently signed on with HostOnce.com. They simply offer the absolute most bang for hte buck... $4.95 a month (about $60 a year), with unlimited storage, unlimited pop boxes, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited EVERYTHING.
HOWEVER, and this is a big however, I suggest you do your homework before signing up with ANY of these providers. While I have absolutely no complains about HostOnce, and would recommend them, there are several complaints about them posted in newsgroups. There are even more complaints about ReadyHosting (it seems as though their servers have been hacked many, many times). I'm not trying to start some big flame war here, so if you use one of these services and you love it, then bully for you. I'm just encouraging people to do their research.
Go to groups.google.com and plug in the host names (for instance, hostonce or readyhost) and search the usenet archives for user complaints. You'll find a lot of information.
And if anyone else is using hostonce, I'd be eager to compare notes. Like I said, so far I'm a huge fan, as the servers appear to be incredibly fast and the price can't be beat. But there are several usenet posts about both HostOnce and Readyhosting cutting off users for using too much bandwidth -- even though both offer "unlimited" bandwidth. (They do both warn you in their terms of service that they get to decide what "unlimited" means.) >>
Wow you just never know where people will talk about you next, first it was F-ckedcompany's forums now Anandtech
Anyway, I don't offer unlimited "anything" because unlimited does not exist. Bandwidth is limited, harddrive is limited, the # of email accounts you can create on the limited harddrive is limited. Rather I go for the up front "here is exactly what you get" approach. There are no surprises that way. You don't have to wonder "when will I go over what is acceptable for bandwidth" you KNOW you can look at your stats and see "oh I'm at 4 gigs and the month is only half over, I'm only allotted 5" no surprises.
Imap is "better" in some ways than pop since your email is on the server and no matter where you check email from, the email is there, this is "good and bad" good if you're mobile a lot, bad because you kind of depend on the server for your email (#1 rule in life, crap happens, even to web serves). We also have webmail available so people can send and recieve email from (most) any browser. It's a very popular feature.
Someone mentioned the 25 email limit, that isn't set in stone, if someone needs a few more email accounts it's not really a big deal to let someone have up to even 100 email accounts, I just set it at 25 since that seemed like a good # for the type of plan offered. Same with the 2 Mysql databases, if someone needs a 3rd or 4th it's not really a big deal to provide that.
Guess I'm gonna owe MarkUsg a few referrals.