[sclug] good vfm hosting providers?

[John Stumbles]

Sprog's just registered himself a domain name (jmetron.com) with 123-reg 
but found the thrown-in free web hosting only gives him a mickey mouse 
site-builder gui, no ftp. I've been humming and haaing about buying some 
hosting (sadly the black cat got eaten by a mythic beast :-)) so 
thinking about a cheapo commodity hosting package. Any heads up on good 
providers to go with, and what to look/watch out for?

Just basically a reasonable amount of web & email space and as little 
frontpage/exchange bollards as possible. Just want to register a few 
domains, point them at web and mail servers and push web pages up to 
them / pop mail off them.

Looking at 123-reg's offerings (http://www.123-reg.co.uk/web-hosting/) I 
can see for starters:
* no php (don't know if I'd want this, though I'm thinking I'd like to 
run a mediawiki which I think wants that and mysql, so maybe a bit 
ambitious for a budget hosting package)
* doesn't say anything about limits of mailbox sizes
* doesn't say how they count the 15 or whatever mailboxes, whether you 
can point your domain name at the mailbox(es), any server-side spam 
filtering
* what happens if you (your site visitors?) go over your data transfer limit


I'm sure I saw a more attractive looking package when I was browsing a 
few weeks back but can't remember where now :-(


-- 
John Stumbles