Need feedback - What are the elements of a good hosting service?

[Skip Montanaro]

About two months ago I started working on a "hosting" page similar to the
"editors" page I maintain) for the python.org website.  It went idle for
awhile, but I want to pick it back up and make something available for the
community.  It's clear from the traffic on the subject that this would be
useful for people.

In parallel, I have been working on a website for what I hope to be my own
software consulting company.  Viewing it as more of a marketing tool than
anything else, I selected a company I thought was fairly well tuned into the
Python community.  During this startup period, I've been struggling to
master elements of their service and have found that standard questions like

    * What version of Python is installed?

    * Can I write my own CGI scripts?

    * How much disk space do I get?

    * How much does it cost?

were definitely *not* sufficient to decide if the service is going to be
adequate to meet my needs.

I don't want things to get too out-of-hand or I'll never release anything,
but I would like some feedback from people on what they find to be the
important secondary issues over and above the obvious stuff above.  I won't
bias the discussion at this point with my own experiences (besides, I have
to get home and cook dinner ;-), but will post something in the next day or
three myself.  Hint: I suspect many of these same secondary issues would be
important no matter how you choose to implement a website that contains
programming elements (CGI scripts, Zope, Webware, mod_python, whatever)
implemented in just about any language (Perl, Python, Tcl, Ruby, C, VB,
...).

-- 
Skip Montanaro (skip at pobox.com - http://www.mojam.com/)