I currently have all my web hosting (very little), mail and usenet news from Gradwell Dot Com, in general I'm happy with the service but they do seem to be becoming a specialist VOIP supplier with the web hosting playing second fiddle so I'm looking for alternatives so that I can spread the risk a bit and/or be ready to move if I feel the need.
I realise it's quite a spread of services I'm after so maybe there aren't any other 'Gradwells' out there that can provide it all in which case I may go for separate suppliers. I suppose that at least minimises the chaos if something goes wrong.
What I'm after is:-
A good, fast, no binaries, NNTP server. Preferably associated with an ssh shell hosting service so that I can run a command line news reader with near instant response from the NNTP server. When I moved to Gradwell it was a revelation how fast their service was compared with anything that accessed the NNTP server across the internet.
Mail forwarding under my control in some shape or form. Currently most of our (family and small business) mail is read usign the IMAP servers at Gradwell except for mine which I forward to the machine where I have the ssh account and read it with mutt there.
Hosting with ssh access.
I'm wondering if a virtual server might make sense, they're available for a tenner a month (or less?) now. Does anyone here have experience of virtual servers?
Any recommendations (or otherwise) for good hosting would be welcome, one major criterion is fast interactive ssh access as I do all of news and mail handling via ssh to 'their' server.
Oh, one final "nice to have" requirement - while Googling around yesterday I saw one hosting site offering ssh access *plus* a web to ssh interface so you could get to the command line from anywhere with a browser. I.e. you wouldn't have to install putty onto a friend's machine to read your mail.