My friend Riyad Kalla is struggling with hosts right now, and he recently experienced some issues with Media Temple.

Thankfully, Media Temple has been actively trying to keep him happy, and they went so far as to even call him on the phone to make sure they solved his problems. That’s a good sign that they are a good host, in my opinion. I would consider them if I feel the need to move.

During his issues, we had discussed Dreamhost via email, and I expressed my general happiness with them as a host.

He did a little research on Dreamhost, however, and ran across all the bad press that they have received recently. A lot of the press comes from the fact that they offer huge numbers; numbers that seem unlikely to be realistic. Honestly I can’t speak for the numbers; I don’t get close to using 4 terabytes of transfer, but I’d like to believe that I could withstand a small-end Digging (we’ll have to see).

Historically, I’ve been with a lot of hosts - up until recently I’ve been with VPS-like accounts from these companies:

• AO Industries
• HostForWeb.com
• eApps.com

Without a doubt, when it comes to uptime, transparency, tech support and general customer satisfaction, eApps is the top of the heap. They are a great host. Unfortunately, because they are full VPS setups, they just don’t offer the same numbers that a shared host like Dreamhost can offer. Just the same, Dreamhost is a close second to eApps.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t recommend HostForWeb on my worst enemy.

It’s hard to compare apples-to-apples however, as this is the first host I’ve used that didn’t offer Java support. I’ve finally pushed my website to the LAMP stack, and it’s certainly made things a lot more cost-effective.

So what’s your opinion on hosts? Are you with Dreamhost; have you had problems? Are you with another comparable host?