I just retired a server that has been doing loyal service as a variety of things over the last 6 or 7 years. It was an old Dell desktop machine, and it served as my mail server, DNS server, database server, and quite a few other things. I think I may have just realized one service that didn't get migrated off of it - a couple of IRC bots which have been dormant for quite some time.
For a while, it also hosted fajita, the bot who answers most of the questions on #apache, on irc.freenode.net, but that moved off about 2 years ago.
And just a few moments ago ...
rbowen@shiraz:~% sudo /sbin/shutdown -h now
Broadcast message from root (pts/1) (Mon May 5 20:36:46 2008):
The system is going down for system halt NOW!
rbowen@shiraz:~% Connection to shiraz closed by remote host.
Connection to shiraz closed.
The goal is eventually to move everything up to slicehost, and I'll probably move my mail servers to Google while I'm at it. I'm tired of being a sysadmin, but not tired enough of it to just have a normal web host.
It's an interesting coincidence that you write about this today because it was a topic of conversation on the LPLUG irc channel -- we (Rick and I) determined that since you were running the an irc server for LPLUG the channel may last longer than the LPLUG website and listserv. Well, maybe we spoke too soon.
In any event, I understand your need to move to more reliable servers or investigate new models of hosting like slicehost. I'll be watching your experience with interest. Hope it goes better than you expect.
Oh, I did wonder about your comment regarding e-mail hosting using Google. Do you mean that you would use Gmail? Or, will Google actually host an smtp server for just anyone (not that you are *just* anyone)?
GMail For Domains is a full mail server solution. You point your MX there, and then you can use either a GMail-ish interface, or you can use pop or imap. Skippy started using this a while back, and he seems really happy with it.