Ok, going by some of the recommendations on this site I had a closer look at Dreamhost and decided to pony up the cash for a Level3 account (Code Monster). It's about $20/month if you prepay a year and coupons on the net were easy to find, so I saved an additional $97.

They also have a 97-day satisfaction guarantee which hopefully I won't have to use. I'm pretty sure the site will be sufficient for my immediate needs though I'm sure the 60GB storage space won't be for the longer term (one of the projects I'm working on is going to suck up a lot of server storage).

Anyone have any esperience using the shopping cart software on this site? After my research into merchant accounts I plan to go the PayPal Merchant route for now and likely upgrade to our own merchant account with a local company later in the year (it just doesn't make sense to do that right now). Because of this I'm not positive I even need SSL as transactions go out to PayPal's own site for billing info. SSL will otherwise require a dedicated IP (right?) which will add about $4/month to the bill on Dreamhost.

I hope to be serving product downloads from this site as early as some time next month and I don't imagine the file for the first project will be over 10MB compressed. 1.6TB/month should be more than enough here (i'd be extremely happy if it weren't of course! )

Anyway, I went this route as I didn't think I'd be making full use of a dedicated server at this time. I can always move everything over toward the end of the year if I need the extra versatility.

Bruno