[mark.roper]

Our current 1and1.co.uk server has 100Gb webspace but we don't need anyhthing like that much. We do have a collection of documents (PDF mainly) that will need a few Gb I guess, so pretty much any hard drive you can buy today would suffice. (if I had to put my finger on it say 10Gb).

Our MySQL database currently holds 60Mb of data, which is approx. 1.5 years worth of transactions for this particular application. I'd estimate 100 - 150 Mb would suffice as we don't intend to store too much (transactional history is used for reference, but there's no need to go further back than 2 years max.). We do however back up the main database into another one overnight via a cron job, so that would be 2 x 150Mb databases required.

Bandwidth, we have 40 remote workers with a 10Mb monthly allowance on our network carrier contract, which I doubt they'll even get close to, so that would be 400Mb per month max.

As you can see, bandwidth, storage etc. are minimal by normal webhost standards, where 1and1.co.uk let us down is raw performance of their servers and the fact they're in Germany and we're in the UK. GPRS is effectively dial-up speed with not particularly good latency, so we need to serve up the data as fast as we can.

edit: I should point out we'd need PHP with gzip configured, as server side compression makes a lot of difference.