I love all the one-click features on the Dreamhost control panel, and I even enjoy all the fun & games they get up to, in a strange way. However, the time has come for a new, improved, and more reliable host to step-up to the challenge. So, as a Web Appropriate reader/visitor, I’d love to know which web hosting provider you entrust with important task of serving your sites, blogs, & apps, and why you chose them over everyone else. Is it the price, is it the support, is it their understanding of your favourite development platforms?

Or do you have any recommendations for alternatives to Dreamhost? My specifications are as follows (in case you need a little more info):

  • They don’t have to have the one-click installs; I’m just about capable of handling WordPress, MySQL, and even Rails deployments now.
  • They don’t need to be UK-based (most UK outfits seem to be pretty sub-par; I had quite a bad experience with Fashosts/UK Reg, and that was without even having a live site running on their servers!).
  • A good customer service track record, and compatibility with the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, Django, Rails etc (I appreciate Rails can be tricky with shared hosts). I think these two go hand-in-hand; your ability to launch a site on a new web development framework can seriously suffer through less-than-optimal customer service!
  • Decent scalability through their pricing structure, i.e. their cheaper services are as good as their high-bandwidth services.

Any suggestions will be much appreciated.