Thanks!
It is kinda' like newegg versus CDW.
There are some weird restrictions, you must have a fixed ip to use the maximum execution time for cronjobs, daemons, and things running in ssh.
Cronjobs are limited to 30 minutes. Daemons are unlimited (but you can get in trouble for saturating the CPU/network), web-based PHP/MySQL, FTP, etc is limited to 12 hours.
I have a site that takes a 2GB csv file once every 3 months and imports it into a denormalized MySQL db, and another site that downloads several hundred images daily and resizes them into thumbnails and a second size.
Each of these required creative solutions. That is what you get for ~$100/yr 'unmetered' hosting.
I looked at the hosting provider you mentioned, and it seems the server is located in Germany w/ upto 4GB of RAM and 250GB of storage for ~$75/month. Says 'guaranteed resources', but who knows how quickly you can saturate the CPU?
Rackspace cloud has a calculator to determine costs and you only have so much throughput, so you can calculate worse-case bandwidth scenario, or have another way to mitigate bandwidth "overages".
http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers...
I would have no problem using a VPS. In that category they even offer a $6.95/month option: http://nqhost.com/cheap-vps.html.
The funny (or worse) thing is that I don’t have any professional sites, and my personal sites are essentially text based. Hence, I never use more than 50MB of Linode’s 200GB! But still… I greatly value having the option of agreeing on a final price and absolutely ruling out any surprises at the end of the month.
By the way, I miss the American meaning of “unlimited” or “flat fee”… There it means what it says, but here in Spain the “flat fees” of mobile operators in particular are so ridiculously abusive that you wonder how it’s legal to advertise them so prominently with two paragraphs of “fine print” afterwards.