I run four sites (soon one more) and I'm paying around $50 a year to host each of them. I notice that the speeds aren't crash hot, but neither is the price I'm paying for them. The speed isn't an issue but for one site, though the new site I'm starting will need decent speeds to keep up. Storage on both services is plenty, so speed is my only concern.

Is dedicated hosting (ie, one box that hosts all my sites) worth the $180 p/m cost, or are there cheaper alternatives for comparable speeds? I don't want to commit to something that expensive without knowing if I'm going overboard. Alternatives (or recommended dedicated hosts) welcome :)

Speeds can really depend on a lot of things. The host and the connection they have, the amount of users hosted on each shared server, and scripts on your site. How large are your sites? If you're not averaging at least10,000-20,000 unique visits a day a dedicated box is probably not worth it.

Maybe a better host is what you seek. What I would do is find a host with a lot of storage, bandwidth, and unlimited domain hosting which you can use the same account to host as many domains as you want. That way you only pay for 1 host a year and not 4.

A good deal I found was here http://www.stalebrew.com/2008/webhosts/w...

for webhosting pad. They have 17,000gb of transfer and 1,700gb of storage per month with the features you need to host additional domains at no cost. Also there is a coupon code at that link that gets you 1 year of hosting plus free domain and no setup fee for 46$.