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SEOHosting.com which is owned by hostgator is very reliable and offers you different class c ip addresses. This service seems to be the most scalable i have seen for what your requesting.

I would focus more on social media with that 10% increase that you were looking to build on. To answer your question I don't think it would raise any red flags with google as long as they were good quality directories with a higher pagerank. My advice would echo what James had suggested to link to category pages instead of only focusing on your homepage to help build your authority to inner pages.