I subscribe to this $3/month hosting since a few months, and the only badness is that about two times so far something "hanged" and I had to contact support so they reboot, and they fixed it within a few hours of notifying with their ticketing system. So I would say that the support is very good, unless its a really critical system when a few-hour outage once a month or two is a problem.

I also subscribe to another hosting account since 2 years, on Xen, for 7 EUR/month, which is $11/month, for 48 MB RAM, 5 GB disk, 10 GB transfer/month, and there the only problem I had was about 1 reboot per year, so the level of service of the $11/month hosting is significanlty better then the $3/month hosting, and I can't imagine that it could be better. So your quotes of prices like $20-$100 a month are like several times overpaying.

Of course I only use these accounts myself, to host an SMTP server for my MX for one e-mail account on one domain and some other small private stuff like that, instead of using a service like Gmail and I don't share the account with any "other people", because that would be too much hassle with negotiating everything with the "other people". By having only myseft on the machine I can configure everything exactly the way I like, and don't have to worry if anybody else likes myconfiguration of the SMTP server, spam-killing methods etc. One of the reasons I don't like to use something like Gmail for SMTP is because I don't know what exactly is the SMTP server configuration, for example the full configuration of the algorithm used to kill spam. So I cannot trust it not to kill a mail which is important for me.