I wanted to get an idea of what to charge hosting companies for remote administration / tech support. I have quite a few private clients and I'm getting requests to do contract work and really have no clue what to charge. (Given the fact a hosting company would be steady work and that I have no clue what in-house admins are paid these days).

I'm a Linux / NT Administrator with about 8 years total experience. I do a lot of troubleshooting and bug fixes on cPanel / WHM, DNS, Apache sendmail / exim and lately I've been getting a lot of security work doing hardening and post compromise audits - assesmants. I work with all flavors of Linux including the smaller non-pretty ones, BSD, Darwin, Unix etc.
Any advice appreciated.

I would aim for $50 - $75 an hour off site if you're really good.

Yeah, starting pay here in Chicago is no less than $55/Hour

For non-contracted work we charge $75/hour usually with 1 hour minimum and then billed in small incriments thereafter.

Onsite admins with 5+ years of experience can run from 45-65k/year and then benefits... look for dynamicnet's post on a few of the issues, he lays out pretty well the average pay for highly experienced sysadmins.

They average $60+ an hour ive noticed

DPI is correct. In Chicago and surrounding areas, absolute minimum is around $50 - $60 per hour.