Hosting support

I was wondering how many people are looking at basing business models on drupal hosting and what type of success has been seen this far? Is most of the business customization work with a side flavor of hosting, or are you just setting up default drupal installations and letting people select their own themes and modules?

Is there any free hosting service that I can try drupal on?
I dont cuurently need big bandwidth, or to make the database too large...just need it to work for some testings first (no use to actually waste money on a test site... I think)

Do you happen to have experience with running Drupal on dedicated server of one of these hosting companies?

The Planet/ServerMatrix
Layeredtech
Liquidweb
transatlanticglobal/GNAX

What can you tell me about them. service, availability, performance etc...

Also, what kind of server maintanance should I expect when moving to self managed server (currently on Dreamhost shared).

Thanks,
-Nir

I just had a story of mine on the frontpage of Digg. Within an hour I had thousands of visitors.
I had previously set throttle to 1000 users. I am just switching fckeditor and search off, but my site survived on a shared hosting environment without a hitch.
Gotta love Drupal for this.

Andre
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
http://www.opentravelinfo.com

I noticed that godaddy is offering an upgrade of their hosting software from Hosting Configuration 1.0 to Hosting Configuration 2.0. This article outlines some risks associated with upgrading. Has anyone upgraded their hosting software in godaddy? I just want to make sure that I do not corrupt my drupal site by upgrading to new configuration; as it would be a pain to revert back to 1.0.
Thank you.

I'm currently running a drupal site www.comagz.com/webmagazine/ on dreamhost shared hosting and it runs fine until I get traffic spikes in which the server fails to serve pages. Each traffic spike is about probably 10,000 visitors in an hour. This is just my estimation, sitemeter shows me around 5000/hour and it only counts the pages that loaded successfuly. (slashdotting)

I want to switch to dedicated (virtual or physical) hosting that can handle the spikes. I'm willing to spend about $100/month.

Checked the options here on drupal.org and found (by elimination) that the feasible options are DWHS Lunarpages and Mediatemple.

Here is my basic data from their websites:

DWHS.com

http://www.dwhs.com/dedicated-plans.htm
Cost:$100 Memory:2G DIsk: 20G BW: 225G
Pro: Payment monthly !
Con: No root access on dedicated server
Con: Virtual not physical.
10 MPS pipe ??? - don't know what it means.

Lunarpages
http://www.lunarpages.com/plan3.php

Dedicated $99 512M 80G 1000G - Intel 2Ghz Celeron!
Setup $99 returned on 4th month

Con: Cpanel +$35/month. Webmin included.
Con: Celeron CPU

Mediatemple
http://www.mediatemple.net/services/webhosting/dv/linux-pps/

Dedicated virtual Standard:
dv base $50 256 , 4, 100
dv rage $100 512, 9, 300
dv extreme $150 1G, 18G, 500G

Dedicated virtual PHP Performance (Zend technology php supercharged):