As promised the site was down for a few days and now back up!  I have decided to go with bluehost.com which was very easy to get set up and rolling.  Their fees are cheap due to the bulk hosting and I am hopeful the pipe throughput is decent however long I stick with this host. Ideally I would buy my own rack mount hardware and have it collocated at a data center.  This gives the greatest control (i.e., I am a known control freak) but adds the usual system administration headaches.

An example of the upshot of having your site on a host like bluehost.com with a tool like CPanel is typical OS, CMS, and various other software updates are all handled automatically behind the scenes or at the most with a mouse click. Not to mention that they take care of all the hardware, redundancy, faileover, etc… issues.  Sometimes, it’s just easier to pay for it and be done!