My pleasure Steve, yes I agree, I was mainly referring to shared, but even for dedicated, if a business needs to use a dedicated hosting service it means it is quite heavily reliant on it's online presence and therefore needs to set a realistic budget to get the service they require to offer a reliable service for their customers. But you are right, cost is always a factor, however it just overrides common sense sometimes :-)

Also, 24x7 support is a fairly abused term, it's very different getting through to a call centre agent trained to be polite than getting through to a genuine tech that can fix the problem (this costs money). Many companies do this well, however the majority, in my opinion don't add much value. A query of technical nature usually needs to wait until the morning anyway and then the Aus/US time difference kicks in.

SergeyS, in my experience, most hosting companies that go out of business, do so because they offered some type of unsustainable offering (I'm talking from experience with clients we get that all of a sudden can't access their site or email) - both Aus and US hosts are guilty of this! It's fine to offer discounts and specials, but on a permanent basis doesn't make business sense. Not to say businesses don't do this successfully, just a note to check a little more carefully when you see unlimited all over the place, they have to be making money somewhere. Me personally, if I'm buying anything or doing business anywhere I want quality and to see the business is sustainable.

Having said that, US hosts are in a better position to offer unlimited bandwidth than Aus hosts. With shared hosting, like you said, most sites won't use the full resource. But whether you have unlimited or enough resources as a customer, what is the difference? You can always revisit the service if you eventually do need more. And therefore the cost becomes neglibible - for a business customer - whether they pay 5 bucks or 50 bucks, it's not a big financial decision, but the wrong decision can cause your business, website and email major headaches! Also, I'm not implying that expensive = good either.

From an Australian point of view, all I'm saying is do your research a bit more carefully if you see unlimited all over the place.

Cheers,
Gavin