Shell provider recommendations
 

Greetings

to make it short , I'm in the middle of searching for a good , reliable and (most importantly) up-to the task Shell provider!
what I'm stuck at is that I'm seeing alot of providers on the net starting from $1.25 to almost infinite limits (ok now I'm exaggerating hehe) but all of them give only superficial details about there offers like saying:
Quota (HDD) : 50 MB or whatever
Background processes : 1-5
and other listings that have absolutely no technical or little value like saying "High firewall protection" (and how high is high?) or like saying "SSH /FTP 24/7"
(as if this wasn't obvious! *sigh*)
But what concerns me the most is whether the shell allows outgoing /incoming connections and/or how many connections and of course how much bandwidth!!

most of these issues are simply left in the dark and instead they present trivial matters like that they have irssi Bitchx screen and other things installed for me (as if I'd be interested in paying them my hard earned cash just to be able to IRC all the day...

then most providers list what is called ircD shells which I think is what I want despite that I'm intending to run a different service than IRCD (basically my own )but since ircd is a server daemon that requires port listening capabilities , then I guess that kind of offer addresses me as well (though the offers always limit the number of clients that can connect I.e incoming socket connections)

then finally there is the dedicated server offer , which is definitely not what my budget can sustain at the moment , in other words that's totally overkill for the scale I'm gonna run what ever I'm gonna run.

SO the question to you folks is:
Does anybody know about good shell providers fulfilling the above attributes and financial limits of ($5-10 max )??
and in case anybody has made experiences with shell providers and the way they lead their business then plz offer your feedback !
Note: I need the responses as quick as possible basically not later than 24 hours since this post (Yes my time is really running short and I need to decide on a shell provider as quick as possible)

As usual: APPreciating ALL comments , help and feedback:)