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Since I launched my first site in 1994, I have had only TWO hosting companies for my largest site (a recipe site getting 10k uniques per day, seasonally as high as 500k uniques per month). One of my hosts was a small local company that had my managed server colocated at a larger firm. The small company went out of business in 2005. I then moved to a "top 10" company (at least in terms of name recognition). Their prices have been high and service has been ok, but not great.

Besides the main site, my server hosts a few smaller sites, a number of parked domains and a few client sites, none with significant traffic. We use PHP liberally but not exclusively.

As I looked at the renewal bill this month, for the same old long-in-the-tooth server, I decided to research other hosts. The prices for similar but newer setups seem significantly lower at about half the name-brand companies I've looked at.

My question is this: I use the command line only when threatened. I am used to WHM. Most of the hosts list cPanel but never WHM. I know they are made by the same company but don't most unix-based servers use WHM, Plesk or webmin as the interface? When a dedicated server listing says it has cPanel, do they mean WHM is included? Are the others (Plesk, webmin) better or worse?

Also, bandwidth seems to be all over the place. I have never encountered additional bandwidth charges, so I'm probably ok with 2000gb but I've seen better deals for 1500gb or even 1000gb. How do I figure out how much bandwidth I'm using (yeah, 15 years doing this and it never came up. Really.)

Final question regards dual core versus quad core. I'm on a dual core now with 2mb RAM. Some companies are offering more RAM for a better price than the faster processor. My tech friends say get more memory. I know getting both would be ideal but which would help more?