Hosting Reccommendations

I've been working with Drupal for nearly five years, and I've tried literally dozens of web-hosts on the way. My goal with this page is to present objective reviews for recent hosts I've had experience with.  I have first-hand experience with all the hosts I review, and I've used them to host real Drupal sites (not just "test" Drupal installs, but actual functioning websites).

This is the list of hosts I've personally used over the past 2 years:

• GreenGeeks

  My Top Pick    |    Check'em Out » 
  PRICE: $6.95/mo
  Admin Tool: cPanel
  
  I'm not necessarily a tree hugger, but I am a fan of anything i can do, as a geek, to improve our environment. These guys offset their carbon footprint by purchasing wind energy credits, enough to offset 300% of their consumption.  Additionally, their servers run dual quad core xeons (8 core total) with tons of features out of the box:  cPanel, ssh access, service status, unlimited everything. 
  
  Though their prices may be higher than some,  it just feels like more of a premium hosting experience.  No nickel and diming, no upsells, no crippled cPanel.  They're also one of the few hosts that offers North-America based phone support.
  
  Fast, full-featured and guilt free.

• JustHost

  Highly Recommended      |    Check'em Out »
  PRICE: $2.95/mo (w/coupon: 50OFF)
  Admin Tool: cPanel
  
  Cheapest cpanel host around. While the feature-set is decent, they nickel and dime you for every premium feature.  (ie: Want SSH, add 10 bucks a year.)  Their cPanel is highly customized, adding at least 10 lines of upsells to the top of your cPanel.  Performance is pretty good, but I don't know what kind of hardware they run., Haven't needed to speak to their customer support yet.
  
  Still, considering the price, JustHost offers a pretty impressive package.  Performance and features are sufficient for most low to medium traffic sites, and I think they're definitely worth considering.
  (this site is hosted with justhost now)
  
  

• MidPhase

  Highly Recommended     |    Check'em Out »
  PRICE: $5-8 $2.95/mo (Starter Package)
  Admin Tool: cPanel
  
  Good balance of price and service. Possibly intermittent performance, but quite fast when all is running properly. Their starter package only allows for one domain and database, their unlimited package runs $6.95/Month.  They don't nickel and dime you, and i got ssh access after requesting it via support ticket (their only form of support).  They use a pretty default cPanel, with service status enabled so you can track your server's load.  I had some issues with performance (intermittently slow), but a few exchanges with support and they had me on an entirely different server that was considerably faster (it also had 8 cores vs. 4 cores on my original box).
  
  This tells me you may be taking a bit of a gamble, as to what kind of hardware you end up on, but overall, I have had a very positive experience with Midphase.
  
  

• AN Hosting

  Highly Recommended     |    Check'em Out » 
  PRICE: $5/mo 
  Admin Tool: cPanel
  
  These guys were bought by MidPhase a while back, and as far as i know, are essentially rebadged MidPhase hosting.
  
  

• Crucial Paradigm

  Recommended      |    Check'em Out »
  PRICE: $6-25/mo
  Admin Tool: cPanel (for shared hosting)
  
  Servers seem uncrowded, great performance and service, but features:price ratio is a bit weak, and these guys don't really "specialize" in Drupal.  Their overly-paranoid mod-security settings give views and other ajax functions some trouble unless you ask tech support to disable it.  Ticket-based support is responsive, and their tech team seems pretty competent.  However, in under a year with them, i had two server outages.  Even though this was most likely due to an upstream provider of bandwidth or power, it didn't leave me with the highest confidence in their service.  Still, overall a positive experience with them.
  

• DrupalValueHosting

  Stay Away     |    (I won't even link to these guys anymore.. please don't sign up with them)
  PRICE: $10/mo
  Admin Tool: cPanel
  
   DVH is a new hosting provider. They started out really strong but have suffered some growing pains on the support side. Blazing fast and cheap, but poor support options. I have seven unanswered support tickets over 3 months old. I still have an account with them (even though i requested cancellation over 6 months ago !).
  

• 1and1

  Not Recommended     |   Check'em Out »
  PRICE: $4-10/mo
  Admin Tool: Proprietary, clunky (but, their vps uses Plesk)
  
  Cheap. Good place to buy cheap domains. Shared hosting runs mySql on remote servers which usually = high latency, and slow load times for DB intensive apps like Drupal. Server software (PHP, apache) is often outdated. Also, their cheapest packages can't run Drupal's clean urls out of the box, don't give you ssh and php's multibyte extension isn't installed.
  

• MediaTemple

  Not Recommended     |      Check'em Out »
  PRICE: $20/mo
  Admin Tool: Proprietary, sexy, mostly intuitive
  
  I've tried the GridService, even with the add-on MySQL GridContainers (~30/month alltogether) and Drupal performance still sucks. Like 1and1, this is due to mySql DB being on a different physical box than your hosting. Faster than 1and1 shared hosting... but still far from 'fast': Proof that a sexy site and control panel do not = great hosting.