Best Hosting in US?

Hello,

Looking at Hostgator, but wanted to know what others are using.

Depends what you want? if you want shared hosting, anything will do, but dont expect much, shared hosting usually sucks.. If you want to get serious, I would suggest getting something from SoftLayer, I ran an entire hosting company off of them for 3 years, GREAT service, great servers, great everything!

I was GOING to say that ThePlanet is 2nd in line for me after SoftLayer, and I couldnt find them on Google... then I realized, SoftLayer actually bought them out, lol.

I use http://www.arvixe.com/

It is cheap enough and works well with codeigniter.

I have only had one server down time but the fixed it straight away once being notified.

Woo, they restarted a service, what do you would think would happen if it was a real problem? Youd be screwed...

Arvixe sucks. My brother worked there for a while actually, as a support tech. The dude that owns it, Arvand I believe is his name, is a total tool to the employees. He treats them like shit, and hires anyone that he can underpay. When my brother was trying to working there, he told Arvand that I was a pretty good Linux Administrator at the time, and Arvand was trying to get him to recruit me for like half of what I was getting paid at the time.. lol.

As im tying this up, I asked my brother about it, and he just told me some more stuff I didnt know. When you apply at Arvixe, you have a "trial period" in which you work support tickets, and apparently you dont even get paid, and if you dont make the cut, then you just worked for free. Also, there isnt really any documentation, he told me that basically they gave him access, and told him to work on some tickets, thats how he learns. Which I agree that thats a good way to learn, but when you are hiring employees for as cheap as you can, they might not be smart enough to just "figure it out". He pays for "Button Pushers", not "Problem Solvers"

Also, I understand the reason for having to answer a ticket in queue and meet an SLA, but apparently at Arvixe, you have to have an answer to them within X minutes, or you're in big trouble, then after that first initial answer, it goes into a black hole. He showed me the ticket queue once and it was like.. thousands deep... Insane. You can also only spend a certain amount of time on a ticket/call, then you have to move onto the next one, meaning no ticket gets a decent amount of technical support.

That is why you pay for premium hosting, so you get REAL support, with REAL administrators who arent stressed out and pissed that they are stuck in a crappy job.