Trying To Find The Perfect Host

I had asked for some help awhile ago and recieved some great advice. Unfortunately, the company I work for decided not to move at that time (between deciding to give the host more chance and also becuase we were all dreading another swich over. However, we are now ready to move.

We are currently on shared hosting and I belive VPS is the best option for us right niw (in this stage of our growth).

What I need is one that is fully managed and then some. I need someone that will provide the same type of support you get with shared hosting - meaning I can even come to them when suddenly we have an e-mail issue for example. And for things tht they don't do, at least have the patience to point me in the right direction, help me know what I need to do. I can handle the admin functions of a shared hosting site... but am leery of doing to much more without guidence...

Another thing I am looking for is someone that we can grow with seemlessly - even if it ends up resulting in going to a fully manged deciated server. With any growth, I do want want downtime or having to change DNS (that always causes us problems). I want someone we ca be with for years, allows us to grow, and is reliable/dependable. I really hate switching hosts!

What we need/our set-up/about us:

I would need at least 10 GB hard drive (SCSI HDDS) to begin with.

We currently have two seperate SMF forums (both private, internal with few users) operating on their own MySQL installations. We will probably add more forums (SMF) in the future - each with their own MySQL databases.

We have a Wordpress blog

We use Coppermine Album (it is also tied into the blog so that thumbnails of photos load into the blog sidebar)

For Transfer/bandwidth - I am not sure. I will guess at least 50G. We currently canlt send a lot of our e-mail out of our server due to e-mail limitations so I don't know exactly how much we will use.

On transfer - the majority of it is e-mail, followed by ftp usage.

I really do need someone who can handle and understand our high volumne of e-mail and will help make sure we have no issues with it. That is actually the lifeblood of our business. We recieve data from our clients each day via e-mail, and then send them back customized reports (each day) based on their data. This means we get a lot of e-mail in, and even more going out. When our e-mail shuts down - we shut down.

Our current hosting uses Cpanel and I do like it (and am used to it), however would consider a different control panel if it has the same basic features of Cpanel and is easy to use. However, I really like the fact that moving a Cpanel sitre to another one is very easy (unless that doesn't work when going from shared to VPS)

We will not be doing any reselling of hosting or anything like that - so i don't need anything geared that way. We actually will probably only have the one site, with a few other domains pointed to that. However, we may eventual create additional sites (with their own name) just for the forums.

I have seen about 10 companies listed in other threads that look really good, but not sure which I want... becuase I am hoping I can stay with who ever I pick for the next 10 years and more...

Some of the ones I am interested in are:

Servint
zone.net
powervps