researching dedicated hosting again, i'm simultaneously impressed by the fairly wide availability of relatively inexpensive hosting, and still appalled that most of it uses redhat. everyone seems eager to foist one of those horrible control-panel things on you, too. the number of places that skimp on ram and then charge inflated per-month prices for more is disappointing.

i research hosting for two purposes: work, a relatively high-bandwidth site, and my stuff, where bandwidth usage is pretty low but i'd love to have complete control over the server.

colocation would be more ideal, in some ways, but the economics dictate that dedicated servers are cheaper.

we'll presumably find someone to donate the server and bandwidth for work (one of the perks of providing free software used by many isps), but it's interesting and a little amazing to see what is out there.