Hi AM,
Rather than reinvent the wheel with your "watcher" script/s try out Nagios - formerly known as NetSaint. I believe you'll be suitably impressed.

As for hosting companies what you are looking for may cost quite a bit - for example one of the hosting companys I use only allows FTP access which is pretty radically useless ;(

However if you can get a DSL connection you could run your servers from home which is what I do (well, I will once my firewall gets fixed).