It's a tough market, but I don't want to discourage you. The more competition the better. The host I currently use is
Feature Price. With them I get 5 Gigs of space, with a minimum of 15 Gigs of transfer per month for $16.95 per month (+ a setup fee). The minimum of 15 Gigs per month is kinda cool: they don't even state a maximum in their service description, but I called them up and asked them what sort of limits they set on the transfer per month. The representative said that they like people to keep their transfers around 15 Gigs per month. But I think if I go over that for the month, they will simply contact me and ask me if this will be a recurring situation and ask for some sort of upgrade charge if it will be - ie they don't automatically start charging me for over usage. However, you might want to call them up and ask them about that specifically if you really want to look into that sort of setup and clarify their terms. They guarantee 99.9% uptime or your money back for whatever period the downtime occurred during. They have an OC-3 and two DS3s for their main lines, and 5 DS1s as backup. And they make some sort of claim that they actually "sit" on a backbone. Their servers are nice and they run FreeBSD so I feel good about staying away from MS, heh. I get all sort of options: PHP, MySQL, CGI-BIN, Perl, Front Page (if you want to use it, I don't), 1 free domain registration with my purchase, hosting for up to 4 domain names and 5 sub domain names, SSL, static IP, unlimited email, unlimited FTP, web based management, etc. They have back up generators for all their servers (one thing I was scared about with them is that they are located in the heart of hurricane land in Florida), and I think their premises are fairly secure. Redundancy across the board for all their equipment, etc. You can check them out just to sort of compare yourself to them. The only thing that I could think of that some people might consider bad about them is that they charge you for a full year's service up front. Like, for my service at $16.95/month they charged me $225 or something right up front (included the setup fee, whatever taxes, etc), so basically you are stuck with them for a whole year after the intial 30 day money back guarantee period, even if you end up not liking them.
Keep in mind though, that Feature Price is constantly ranked as one of the best hosting services out there in various reviews though. So comparing to them is like comparing to one of the best, and not everyone wants that much service and can figure that they can get less service for a cheaper price elsewhere. So far I am happy with them but I have barely used my hosting space or transfer capabilities because my site development is going slow (I'm the only one working on it, and I have to attend classes, etc).
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