Dan, this is a good idea. The only problem I have with it is that a lot of disreputable web hosts tend to be fly-by-night and shut down/restart the first time Webhosting-Talk gets a hold of them.
Having said that, I'd like to recommend a spammer haven of a host that has been around for years and was the classic "good boy gone bad":
Interland. When I started learning ASP back in 2000, they were the only host that I could find that actually did a decent job of supporting what I was trying to do (partly because I was a n00b to ASP at the time and partly because none of the other ASP-based hosts offered proper database support).
Unfortunately, they were expensive even by 2000 hosting prices (which were about 4-5x higher than they are now for similar accounts). The plan I needed cost $44.95 (I needed a dedicated SSL since the site in question was one of the first e-commerce sites in Canada). I got everything set up and it worked pretty well.
Fast forward about a year, to 2001. Interland began aggressively acquiring smaller web hosts, including Communitech and a host I was using for a smaller site, Burlee Networks. Because the Burlee plan that I had (a $12.95/month "unlimited" plan that was very limited but still plenty for what I was doing with the site at the time) was less expensive than the cheapest Interland plan at the time, a sales rep phoned me and wanted me to "update" my plan with the closest matching Interland plan...the same $44.95 per month plan I used for the e-commerce site.
I told the lady that I had printed out the terms and conditions of the hosting plan when I signed up for it, which stated that it would never go up as long as I was hosted on Burlee's network (since the IP addresses hadn't changed and Burlee was still being operated as a subsidiary company, I was still technically okay). I hadn't actually printed the ToS, so it was a stone bluff, but it worked.
A few months later, I started noticing that the larger site kept going down during peak periods...which, in all fairness, was partly due to the seasonal and "spiky" nature of the business they were in. Because of this, I got to the point where I'd fill out a support ticket a week in advance when I expected a site spike, only to find that the site would go down again.
Fast forward again to December of 2001. I noticed a series of PHP files on the larger site. Since the site was an ASP-based site and since I was the only one who ever FTPed anything to the site or did anything with it, I knew that the server had been hacked somehow. I brought this to Interland's attention, and they asked me why I uploaded the files if I thought they were hack attempts.
"Check your FTP logs. I didn't upload the PHP files."
"So how do you know if they're hack attempts if you didn't upload them?"
"It's BECAUSE I didn't upload them that I know they're hack attempts, genius."
"Sir, that's not necessary. We're not going to be held responsible for this."
I ended up digging a little deeper, Googling the filenames and eventually finding out that the cause was a security vulnerability in Hosting Controller (a crude CPanel clone) that had been patched a few months before. I brought this to Interland's attention and they resumed asking me why I had uploaded the files in question.
At this point, I decided to look for a new host and was able to turn a negative into a positive when I found my present host, Sectorlink. So it wasn't all bad...I found a hosting source that saved me a buttload of money (and actually provides service, which is something most companies don't ever get).
However, it took me a few months to find them (and another year to convince my client to switch, since they were in the middle of a busy period.) This was long enough for me to discover that all of Interland's IP ranges (they had non-consecutive IP ranges) had been blacklisted in a number of spam databases due to the large number of spammers that still exist there today. When I mentioned this to them, and that my client's emails were getting bounced back due to blacklisting that they had nothing to do with, their answer was "we can't control who sends what on our networks, and we don't ban anyone for sending emails". Ummmm...yeah you can, idiots.
Anyway, that's my hosting horror story.
... I even emailed one of the support guys at his yahoo email (never a good sign) and still got no reply ... so they've taken my money and ran ... If I had done something wrong or against their TOS I'd hold my hands up ... but as they have never contacted me all I can do is warn others
