I run a fairly sizeable fansite, which is currently doing about 30 gigs of traffic a month. The bandwidth has been steadily increasing by about 5 - 6 gigs a month, and I expect it to keep growing at that pace, if not much faster (it's a Lord of the Rings site, and what with TTT coming out, and our site getting more and more recognized in the LotR community...) I'm currently hosting with Diginode, and am very lucky that they recently bumped up their bandwidth for my package to 50 gigs a month, but I'm going to be coming up against that very soon (as I run a couple of other smallish fansites on the server that are also taking some bandwidth). I'm ready to move on from Diginode as it is, as my server has been down far too often in the past few weeks, and it's getting frustrating. I'm not very knowledgeable about server administration, and have very basic knowledge of Unix, so am a little leery about jumping up to the dedicated level. Is this my best bet? And are there any dedicated server hosts out there in the $100 - $150 range that you would recommend as being suitable for a newbie? I'd like to hear some past experiences or opinions/advice, if anyone has any. Thanks!

Rackforce.com is amazing in the support department. If you have a question, they have 24/7 support via phone or trouble ticket, and they all go above and beyond the call of duty.

well, you can always get managed servers. So you don't have to deal with technical stuff and have some experienced people to handle everything for you.

absolutely go with a managed server. also I would suggest some decent firewall protection due to your particular visitors. They're certainly not the warez crowd, but there are some fringe visitors, and it only takes one.

I would have to second 6pm's vote for rackforce. they have what you need for just a little more than your stated range, and they are very good people to work with.

I would go with their premium support, which includes a firewall protection among other things.

nice site BTW