[plug] hosting

[Gregory Orange]

Hi everyone,

I posted here a while back about a web shop, and got quite helpful 
responses, thanks all. Now that we've settled upon Magento as a platform 
and are paying someone to build the actual site, we're thinking about 
hosting space. For the short term we'll use the people who are building 
the site because that allows time for it to get settled and working 
properly, and will be easy access for them to fix any problems.

After a few months, we'd like to at least consider other hosting, to 
make sure we're getting a reasonable deal. So, my question - can you 
give me an idea of hosting providers that are worth their salt, and how 
much we should expect to pay to host a web shop. The business is 
for-profit, but hardly any (and no income for the owners) - maybe in 
time it will grow. I don't know where it should be hosted, but all of 
the customers are in Western Australia, perhaps one day there will be 
other Australian customers.

If we do change hosting, I imagine migration will be a cinch? Dump the 
MySQL database, tar up the entire htdocs (or whatever) dir; move over to 
the new environment; change DNS, and all's peachy... right? Some down 
time I suppose, so that would have to be publicised.

Thanks,
Greg.