i am starting an innovative community site which uses Perl and MySQL and am looking for a good affordable host for that...

obviously i want to believe i will have a lot of traffic - common delusion i know - in any case i want a good starter host that also has good upgrade options if things get busier. in any case i want to start with a $10 a month shared hosting set up..

i have narrowed things down to...

www.tera-byte.com
www.palmversa.com
www.aletiahosting.com
www.downtownhost.com
www.jaguarpc.com

comments? additional suggestions?

Do a search for some of those companies on this site. I think more than one of them are asked about often and so you might find your answers faster with a search.

Good Luck!

On your list, I'd say Aletia. Off your list, Hosting Matters (http://www.hostmatters.com) or Future Quest (http://www.futurequest.com). FQ is a bit more expensive than all the others.

Well I've heard both good and bad things about tera-byte, but I've never actually had any experience with them.

I'd definatley recommend both DownTownHost and PalmVersa, I've had an account with DTH for quite a while and Jorge is probably the friendliest support guy (and owner of it) that you'll ever talk to. Being the ones that designed PalmVersa's site, I only have limited experience with them. I haven't actually tested an account, but I've been to the site many times and haven't noticed any downtime, and I'd only have good things to say about the customer service (from talking with Palm directly, and from looking at the support forums).

From my experience, I would narrow the choice down to those two, but utlimatley the decision is yours, good luck ;)

(I'm about to send a PM about PalmVersa as well, so check those in a minute :) )