I don't know of any library-specialized Drupal hosting companies. My 
company (http://www.yourlibrarysite.com/) and Cary's 
(http://chillco.com/home) are focused on library-specialized Drupal 
development and consulting. YourLibrarySite does not provide hosting for 
websites that we did not develop. We do host some library websites that 
we developed, but we're currently searching for a hosting partner, so 
that we can focus on our core business of development and consulting. 
Perhaps Cary, who is on this list, can answer what his company offers in 
terms of hosting.

My personal opinion is that you should stay away from shared hosting 
plans like GoDaddy. It's extremely difficult to implement anything 
approaching an acceptable security policy with such plans. Public shared 
hosting plans are a relic of the 90s, when all you needed was a place to 
upload some HTML files and make them publicly available on the web. Once 
you're working with a PHP application like Drupal, and if you care at 
all about security, your entry point is a VPS. You can get one as cheap 
as $20/mo from Linode (http://www.linode.com/index.cfm) or SliceHost 
(http://www.slicehost.com/).

When working with a VPS, you're responsible for all server and 
application administration, tuning, and trouble-shooting. If you're ok 
with that, great, but otherwise, you may be interested in 
http://getpantheon.com/get-mercury once they're out of beta. Starting at 
$50/mo, it's a hosting plan specifically tuned for Drupal from a company 
that knows Drupal inside and out. I don't know what they plan on 
offering in terms of support. I think they're still trying to figure out 
the very difficult business model of offering quality support at prices 
that people are willing to pay.

Acquia offers enterprise-level hosting and support starting at $500/mo 
(http://acquia.com/products-services/acquia-hosting). They're top-notch, 
if you can afford them. They recently announced a partnership with 
RackSpace (http://acquia.com/blog/acquia-rackspace-partnership-0), which 
will very likely lead to a lower-priced package, but they haven't 
released details about such a package yet.

Beyond some initial price-point that gets you a server connected to the 
internet with whatever level of services and support is included in the 
package, price goes up as you need to scale. So if you have a complex 
website with high traffic, you'll need to do some capacity planning.

Best of luck,
Alex.

Jill Ellern wrote:
> Our IT department isn't exactly enthusiastic about us trying this out on one of their servers and are talking maintenance and disk replacement costs if we want to try it out. (They will get back to me on exactly how much later...)  It seems to us that if they are talking about charging us, we should compare prices for hosting a drupal server else ware (We have a ghost/deepfreeze server windows 2003 but that's all). Either a server we buy or hosted offsite.  However, I don't know where to start.
>
> I know we can put this open source software on a PC...and we've done that but this isn't a solution for a production level web service  
>
> What is the average cost of hosting a drupal server out there in the cloud?  Are there things we should know?  Would you recommend anyone that does this for libraries?
>
> Jill
>
> --
>