This is a few hosts that I can personally recommend. I recommend a hosts because I have personally dealt with them, they are run and managed by good people, people who are willing to dirty their hands and take care of their clients, people who truly cares about you and your business!
1. Good Shared Hosting Provider
My first choice of a good shared hosting would be LiquidWeb. Being one of the premier managed hosting provider, they have a solid and responsive support team. You can expect 10-15 minutes response time for any support queries and faster resolution time than most providers out there.
A little bit of cons, they’re pricier than most provider out there. Their basic plan starts from $15/month. For the sake of comparison, commonly basic shared hosting plans from decent providers are priced between $8-10. But come on! You spend much more than that each month on Starbuck and Burger King, why not invest that amount on your website and business?
2. Good Semi Dedicated Hosting Provider
This spot also goes to LiquidWeb. Same reason, superior and knowledgable support experience. You can expect to receive one of the most responsive semi dedicated hosting experience available in the planet.
The con is also the same, their semi dedicated plan starts from $40/month, which is roughly 20-100% higher than other providers. A trade-off between reliability and price, but your business deserve it!
3. Good Self Managed VPS Provider
My personal favourite for self-managed VPS has always been DigitalOcean. The VPS are very easy to deploy and backup, reliable and they are very affordable. I have VPSs for staging area with uptime of 400 days+ without a single network or power hiccup.
DISCLAIMER: this is not a heavily used VPS, in fact it doesn’t serve any traffic at all since it’s only used for application development.
The only con is that you cannot expect to receive any meaningful support from them. If you’re hitting a dead-end, you must find a way to resolve the problem by yourself (they have an extensive knowledgebase that I found quite helpful). Of course, without proper support I am not recommending to utilize their VPS for production or mission critical node, but if you need an off-site staging node, development node or VPS for any non mission critical side-project, DigitalOcean would be my first choice!
4. Good Fully Managed VPS Provider
My favorite for mission critical hosting provider is Boxintense. The core strength of Boxintense is that they have proper infrastructure and system that truly look at everything that happening on your server. When something goes wrong, their staffs can accurately pinpoint the cause and fix it in much faster way than everybody else does. This is a major pros that no other provider has been able to provide for me. Solid control over your infrastructure, solid team supporting you, fair priced and up to date system, simply couldn’t ask for more!
5. Good Self Managed Dedicated Server Provider
Online.net, despite being a budget provider, they have truly the best network performance on Europe. I have a lot of servers with them with 200 days+ uptime, and they continuously driving 600-800 Mbps+ throughput on them throughout Europe, Middle East and even African traffic. I have never found any of them being slowed down or throttled in any way.
6. Good Fully-Managed Dedicated Server Provider
Again, Boxintense on this one. Have 2 of their smart servers running for 500 days+ uptime, before I decided to asks their help to migrate me into a server with new OS when CentOS 7 was out, resetting my uptime beancounter to 0. Running heavy traffic servers was an easy and painless tasks with them.
7. Good Cloud Hosting Provider
While my experience with cloud providers are very limited, I would say that RackSpace have earnt my respect in this regard. Being one of the core sponsor of OpenStack, they have the latest technologies OpenStack has to offer. I generally like OpenStack based cloud much better compared to competing technologies (such as VMware and OnApp), due to the transparency and open-ness. An interesting feature from this open system is that you will be able to move your cloud from one provider to another as long as they still uses OpenStack.
One bit of disclaimer though, I generally does not endorse the usage of cloud with SAN-based shared storage technologies, as performance are usually suffer from shared usage (noisy neighbour behavior), latencies from underlying block-level synchronization technologies and latencies from added network infrastructure (local storage will always have a better latency compared to network storage). Again, using cloud is a bit of an exchange between performance and abilities to easily scale up and down.
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