you can use “surfstation” coupon with your mediatemple gridserver service, so you can take advantage of 15% off.. That makes $170 for a 1 year gridserver, not so bad..

i swear by www.mediatemple.com use them.

I would like to see what your readers say too, as my sites have been down more than up lately because of Dreamhost. I dont know what is going on over there, but it is ridiculous!

Hang in there, snowflake.
A lotta L.A. blogs are loading rilly slow the past couple of days too.

As a starting point, you can look at the Netcraft hosting reliability page:

http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/Hosters

It’s a good place to see a number of providers and how they rate. I’m partial to 1and1.com, myself.

Our new site is at (mt), as well. So far they get a + for tech support (real humans pick up the phone, imagine that), but a - for flawless performance (mild speed issues, etc.). I’d say thumbs up, on balance, for now. Getting a real person on the phone in times of crisis is a big deal and a big comfort.

What about lunarpages.com? Can’t remember if they offer PHP 5, but they have big space too and great uptime.

I switched from Lunarpages to Dreamhost because of one thing only - SSH access. :\

I host myself. If you have a decent upload speed, then it could be plausible, but since you guys have so many photos, then I wouldn’t recommend it. It was the best option for my text-based services.

I’ve been relatively happy with (mt) as well. I think they’re finally getting the kinks worked out of their new grid server system. It was a bit flakey in the beginning.

If your site gets even a a moderate amount of traffic, I would stay away from Lunar Pages. They’ll turn your site off at the drop of a hat, without any notice at all. I had some big problems with them. Their tech support sucks, too.

I used to be on Dreamhost, moved to Mediatemple because of reliability issues, can’t say I’m very happy with Mediatemple either. The gridserver has been pretty terrible, and just last week they slapped me with an overage charge for GPU usage. Factor that into the pricing, my site doesn’t get that much traffic and they’re charging me almost 50% than the standard rate.

If you can afford it, go rackspace all the way. My employer (a web design / development company) has been using rackspace for a long time. They are really pricey, but rock solid when it comes to both reliability and continued support.

Mosso.com might be more reliable, and is a venture company of rackspace.com.

I don’t recommend 1and1, I’ve heard many bad experiences from them. Oh and godaddy is absolutely horrible in terms of reliability and support. DO NOT go with them.

-Nick

We run FreshArrival and FreshPhotograph on (mt). They used to be rock solid (back when I first got an account in 03, until their Grid server up(down?)grade recently. My SQL connection went down randomly all the time for awhile. It’s much more stable now, so I’d recommend them again.

For my Rails apps, it’s TextDrive all the way.

WOW. thanks so much for everyone for helping out ~ all your advice and insight has been extremely helpful in our research today!

I’ve been using http://www.tigertech.net for years now, and they have great tech support and service. Not sure if they have the features/prices you want, but worth checking. They’re who I recommend for all my web design clients if they’re looking for a host.

This is another vote for 1and1 - I like them tons.

Don’t use them myself but my mate loves them http://www.aplus.net/. They’ve got great customer support and brilliant uptime.

Check out WiredTree:

http://wiredtree.com

They have what you need for a reasonable price.

send me an email for a cupon for dreamhost, i can hook you up if you would like :-). Im a 4 year dreamhost user and have never had a second of downtime. yeah, thats right.

Brinkster made be worth a look too; solid control panel, good uptime, and live-chat support 24x7

I’m going to drop Dreamhost for a new host too. Their uptime has been horrendous lately! I’ve been tracking my uptime with Montastic for the past few weeks and my sites go down multiple times a day, every day. Dreamhost blows.

dude. it’s the lesser of two evils. all i can say is mediatemple always seemed to be dicks to me back in the day when i was considering spending more for their service than the other options at the time. they aren’t premium so why would i want to pay more? they are in the same problem ridden building dreamhost was in (and myspace) down in LA. dreamhost got smart and moved since there were so many power outages there. if you want more than 99% uptime then you are going to have to pay a lot more than i personally thing that like percentage point is worth. 3 days of downtime a year is a small price to pay for how little you are already paying for service.

I’ve been with HostingFX for a while now.. no problems at all. Although my site isn’t as popular as yours!

Dreamhost are still in the same building, but they also have a second datacenter…

They are actually improving, i’ve been hosted with them since 2003 and can’t say i’ve had much downtime, I wouldn’t trust mt though, or lunarpages, they’re both no better than DH (i’d say they’re worse from previous experience). - the problem with shared hosting, isn’t the hosts it’s what the idiots on the same server as you are doing… you could always ask DH to move you to another machine and move your databases to another machine.