6 SoftLayer Technologies Inc.
4 Amazon.com, Inc.
3 ThePlanet.com Internet Services, Inc.
2 NoZone, Inc.
2 ServePath, LLC
1 BitPusher, LLC
1 Columbus Network Access Point, Inc.
1 Global Netoptex, Inc
1 Layered Technologies, Inc.
1 RackForce Hosting Inc.
1 Time Warner Telecom, Inc.
We have more than a dozen boxes at SoftLayer, having started there in August 2006. They're smart, nice folks and they deeply understand what their customers are looking for in dedicated hosting. I've traded emails in the middle of the night with their CEO, called support and gotten resolution to nightmare issues in a matter of a few minutes, sent them sharp criticisms on their forums to find the issues fixed weeks later. They're not perfect -- I think you'd be better off elsewhere if you really need to lean on them for system administration tasks -- but if you want boxes, power, and network, they're great.
Do you get any sort of volume discount? I can't see anything of the sort mentioned on the SoftLayer website, but would seem rather odd if someone who rented a dozen boxes from SoftLayer and resold them to someone else would get an 8% discount but someone who rented the same number of boxes but didn't resell them wouldn't get any discount.
SoftLayer always has specials running, and their salespeople are happy to work out competitive pricing on multiple servers. We don't get the reseller discount per se, but I don't think any of our boxes are at list price.
We have 6 boxes with Softlayer and they've been night and day with our previous host, RailsMachine. RailsMachine is an excellent VPS host but it took a month to get our flapping DB server repaired. Softlayer built us a cluster in 2 hours, and we were migrated that same night. If you need to scale - I can't recommend SL highly enough.
Softlayer is amazing. I've been with 5 different hosts, and Softlayer is head and shoulders above anyone else. We host several sites, including a big website, pushing out over 230 Mbit/second. Their infrastructure is great.
We're using Amazaon AWS with EC2 and S3 for streamfocus.com, and we are amazed at how well (and fast) it is running. Our Ubuntu server instance is running SBCL Lisp with Portable aserve with Apache providing ssl. So far, it is truly impressive (We launched on Ec2/S3 a week ago - it takes us 3 minutes to fire up another instance if we need to).
We're able to update at anytime with a simple ssh link, a GIT push, and then emacs/slime directly in to the SBCL thread running (after testing on local machines first, of course). We can do complete updates with no interruption in service - a very nice feature)
I just switched to SliceHost. It is very affordable and has excellent service. If you want a step-by-step guide to running Django + lighttpd + flup for fcgi + mysql, I just posted instructions on the wiki
http://wiki.slicehost.com/doku.php?id=install_django
I'm using Slicehost, and it's been a really great experience. I've been with them for about a year, and haven't had any downtime that I've noticed. Current uptime is 82 days, and that was when I changed over from Ubuntu to Debian.
I've also tried a Joyent accelerator, and wasn't very happy with it.
It would be helpful to know something about your requirements: as you move away from commodity hosting, the hosting world becomes more complex in what it provides.
I've been very satisfied with my Slicehost (http://www.slicehost.com/) account, for excellent virtualized hardware, but depending on your scale, need for growth, geographic location, need for dedicated boxes, et cetera, someone else is likely appropriate.
I have a dedicated server at iweb8.com (canadian company, extremely reliable so far, very transparent about any issues on the company blog--which is hosted elsewhere just in case). I like my dedicated server, but I recently bought a 512MB slice at slicehost so I could experiment with CouchDB (which is alpha software, so I wasn't comfortable running it on my live production server), and it makes me wonder if I'm not wasting my money on the bigger dedicated server.
I have my dedicated server running every service I need (Apache with PHP, PostgreSQL, Postfix, Dovecot, ASSP, Helma), like many people do. But I'm beginning to think it would be better to have the simplicity and peace of mind of separate virtual servers for a few of these functions. E.g., Mail on its own box, Apache-with-PHP on a box, lighter-weight Apache with Helma on another.
We (Virtualmin) have two boxes at The Planet, who we've always been happy with, a couple of Amazon EC2 instances, and we're about to try a box at LiquidWeb (maybe...I'm still shopping around). We also have an account at SourceForge.net for our Open Source stuff. Given that we're pushing out over two terabytes a month in downloads, not paying for it is good.
ServerBeach has always provided good service to me in the past.
Joyent are really smart guys, and their Accelerators are a good deal. (And I'm not just saying that because they are the biggest host offering Virtualmin.)
Call me paranoid, but I don't trust hosting where I don't own the equipment. Uptime aside, I don't like the idea that data and machines can be accessed (or subpoena'd) without my knowledge.
We recently moved our startup Feedity (http://www.feedity.com) to ReliableSite.Net (http://www.reliablesite.net) - a load balanced multi-server clustered hosting platform. The customer service is good, and uptime is well maintained. So far so good!
Go to webhostingtalk.com and look at their dedicated hosts section.
Also look at the hosting offers section, a lot of good hosts have great offers there from time to time.
We use liquidweb, they own their datacenters and are not as big as the planet (which means better service for smaller i.e. less than 15 server clients). They have great server management.
Myself and my company have used dreamhost for the past few years. Decent service, although my site has gone off line at least once. Email has broken more than once.
They almost always respond to customers within 24 hours, but it often takes at least 1-2 hours.
Even if you don't sign up, their blog is worth reading.
I have just signed up for a half-rack for $399 a month at calpop.com it includes 4 mbps bandwidth. I signed up today so it is not ready yet but I am excited to finally get the hosting configuration I have wanted for a long time now.
I use SoftLayer. Their control panel and functioning KVM over IP (IPMI) amazed me to no end, and they resolved two non-critical network issues fairly quickly.
why the downmod? I understand some folks dislike Rackspace (a company I worked for used Rackspace for a while and we've had a fair share of issue), but why downmod the poster?
The list changes every few months, too. In the past few months, it seems that SoftLayer and Amazon (EC2) have gained popularity at the expense of smaller hosts.
I heard good things about this company too, so I signed up for an account. The customer service and prices were fine, but my site was down a lot, so I cancelled.
If saving $100 (or even $200, or $300) on hosting is your competitive advantage, you're in serious trouble. Don't get me wrong, I believe startups should be frugal to the point of comedy, but being secretive about who you host with is just silly (if someone wants to know, they can find out, anyway...IP addresses contain a lot of information).
