Web Hosting Service Questions?

Here are some of the companies that either I or trusted friends have direct experience with:

3Tera and CIHost: Experience with these companies were very negative. I will not go into all the things that went wrong, because it would be easier to list the few things that went right, but I recommend avoiding them.

Amazon has a reputation for very erratic performance, especially disk I/O and you have no control over what hardware you are running on. Tgey are aiming more at the developer than enterprise market.

Rackspace: Apart from hosting your own hardware at a co-location facility, they seem be be the best bet, but are certainly not perfect. Things like the report writer we were using, and various third-party DLLs we were using did not work. It took several attempts before we had a full set of scripts that could move over the DB, active server pages, sendmail files, init files, config files, etc., that we needed and have everything working.

- Rackspace's technical support is good and responsive. We've been able to get support 24x7 (e.g., at 2:30 AM on as Sunday morning). They tend to know what they are talking about and are fairly candid.

- A major concern for us is to have as much control over our applications as possible (e.g., not just being able to update DB statistics so that queries run faster, but being able to override the Query Analyzer suggestions, or change the Apache server settings at all levels, etc. Rackspace doesn't give us complete control, of course, but gives us more than the alternatives we looked at. However, almost all of this is done through their "control panel." That is a good interface when it's working, but we have had two instances so far when it was not working. It usually is fixed within 12-24 hours, but we were not given notice of the problems, until we found them, even though it seems clear that Rackspace already knew of the problems.
Buggy behavior there caused problem such as copying over directories to Rackspace that we know are there but can't be seen, or permissions being screwed up for directory structures (and in a very unintuitive way).

- Their new center in Texas, seems to have more trouble than the older centers. They have had site failures at least 3 times in the past 8 months or so.

Arthur, what are you looking to do? Are you only wanting to run your company website or are running some type of service or web application?

The previous posters have highlighted some great providers for enterprise hosting, but they might be a little pricey for smaller organizations.

To further Keith's point, if you're running just a company website or small ecommerce site then VPS or a robust shared plan should be plenty. I would error on the safe side and do VPS. It's much cheaper than a dedicated server and a significantly better service than shared.

Check out these vendor comparison guides for pricing and features of VPS and Budget web hosting:

http://www.webhostingunleashed.com/comparison-guides/budget-hosting/
http://www.webhostingunleashed.com/comparison-guides/vps-hosting/

Thanks for your insight everyone, very helpful. I am planning on running a small ecommerce site, so I'll look into VPS like you suggested. I really enjoyed your comparison guides, Chris. They were very helpful and they answered some of my next questions.