It's amazing how much prices have come down since I set-up with the current service provider. We are currently paying $250 a month for colocation, and at the time we signed up it was the cheapest we could find. Certainly there was nothing that cheap in the Washington DC area.

Since I've started looking this time around everything I've found has ranged from $50 - $200, and that's just locally. Last time I was looking nationally (internationally if you count Canada where the server ended up initially). A variety of options are included in the prices and there are set-up fees as well, so figuring out which service to go with is kind of tough. Is it worth paying $50 more a month for 20GB more bandwidth? How easy is it to get access to your server? Is the company even reputable (a serious question when talking about internet based companies theses days)? That sort of thing.

One company that initially quoted $100 a month and a $100 set-up fee came back, apparently after looking at seaturtle.org, and offered to reduce the rate to $50 a month with no set-up fee. The guy that wrote back to me said it looked like a good cause and he wanted to help. You gotta love that kind of attitude. Customer service is key. Hopefully you don't ever need it, but when you do you want it to be good!

Only one other company has provided a quote as low as $50 (not a special deal, that's just their price), but they have a $325 set-up fee. And they are about half the distance from me that the other company is. Is 15 minutes of driving time in an emergency worth an extra $325? The person I've corresponded with there also gave me great vibes. Very friendly and found some good references to them on the web.

What to do? What to do?

Anyway, that's where we stand so far...