FDC (FDCServers.net) has come a long way since I last dealt with them. (I remember back when they had a couple Cogent lines). They’ve now got 81 Gbps of connectivity.
Internap has long been the Internet provider when latency/speed matters. They basically buy lines from all the big providers, and peer with lots of the smaller ones, so that, unless your hosting company has their own private peering agreements, it’s basically impossible to find a shorter route. People hosting gameservers, or really just anything “high quality,” love Internap. I’ve seen prices in the $100-200 range for 1 Mbps. (This is purely for the transit: it’s all well and good to envision $100 for a 1 Mbps line to your house as good, but that’s not what it is. This is when you’re in a data center where they have a presence and run a line to them. The cost is just for them carrying your packets.)
FDC now has a 10 Gbps line to Internap. “Word on the street” is that Internap had some sort of odd promotion at $15/Mbps if you bought in bulk, and FDC wisely jumped, getting a 2 Gbps commit on a 10 Gbps line.
I’m working on getting Xen running on my laptop. It’s interested me for a long time–it’s a GPL’ed virtualization platform. You can use it on your desktop to experiment with various OSs inside VMs, but it’s also awesome on servers to run multiple virtual machines as virtual private servers.
Do you remember Cobalt RaQs? I distinctly remember ogling them and thinking they were the best things ever. (Of course, now we see them as 300 MHz machines…) It turns out that, when Cobalt went belly-up, they released a lot of the code under the GPL or similar. The BlueQuartz project is an active community-developed extension of that, and, combined with CentOS, it apparently runs well on “normal” computers now. (True, you don’t get the spiffy blue rackmount server or the spiffy LCD, but you do get to run it on something ten times as powerful.)
I’m still itching to host a TF2 server. I’ve found that they’re all either full or empty, with few in-betweens, and that a lot of them aren’t ‘adminned’ as tightly as I’d like: games like this seem to attract irritating people, and not enough servers kick/ban them.
cPanel seems to have come a distance since I last used that, too, and you can now license it for use just inside a VPS at $15/month.
Mailservers are hard to perfect. There are lots and lots of mediocre ones, but it’s rare to come across an excellent one, something that can deflect spam seamlessly, make it easy to add lots of addresses, and provide a nice web GUI. All of the technology’s out there, but for some reason, mailservers are among the hardest things in the world to configure. (Even my thermostat is easier to use!) Especially given my affinity for spamd, it’s no wonder that I’m so impressed with the Mailserver ‘appliance’ that Allard Consulting produces. It’s essentially all of the best things about mailservers (greylisting, whitelisting, SpamAssassin, Postfix with MySQL-based virtual domains, a spiffy web interface with graphs, Roundcube…), hosted on OpenBSD, coming as a pre-assembled ISO.
Computer hardware’s come a long way lately. I’d imagine it’d be fairly easy to assemble a machine with a good dual-core (or quad-core!) processor, 4 GB RAM, and a few 500 GB disks for around $1,000.
Colocation + 1,000 GB transfer on Internap at FDC is $169. (Or $199 for 5 Mbps unmetered, but that’s probably overkill.) Are you thinking what I’m thinking? (Hint: everything on this list indirectly leads to these last two point!)