With the US Economy on the fritz the shell community is starting to see the pinch.  A few companies are starting to cut back on their number of servers for hosting.  Sh3lls.net has removed two of their servers already in an effort to downsize and cutback on operational costs.

To some companies they diverse their servers with different datacenters (connections to the Internet for their clients) which is a good thing.  All your servers at one Datacenter even if they are in different parts of the same Datacenter could still lead to disaster.

There are a few companies out there that have a diverse server selection.  Outlandz/xzibition, Sh3lls, Santrex, and Digitalshells offer some of the most mulitple server accomidations.

While shell servers are on a slight downside what seems to be on the up side is VPS Servers.  Alot of companies are now offering VPS servers which allow the average joe (with a little bit of work) to basically have a server to call their own for their own hosting needs.  But beware some vps hosting companies may not offer IRC Access.  Thus your left with a server you can use to host websites, data or offline hubs for Botnets.