I have no wide area of experience running websites on different hosts, but I kind of went out of my way searching for hosting services based both in Europe and the US and ranging from cheap shared hosting to VPS and spent a lot of time reading TOS, Level Agreements etc as well as reviews.
Although I in no way reject companies that offer the "unlimited" resources in traffic and space, they are not my immediate preference. I like to have an idea of what this can mean practically. Having "unlimited" capacity and being on a server with too many users won't do me any good. Many of them even have terms setting the maximum number of files you can have (kind of stupid-sounding if you pair it with the "unlimited" advertising), others have a tight policy on resources used at any time, others enforce their terms quite forcefully, pushing you to upgrade to a higher cost hosting service. Others have weird procedures for changing hosts and preventing automatic renewals, others don't allow you to keep any of your backups in your space etc.
I chose the company that offered the most straightforward and less limiting terms I could find paired with more than adequate space/traffic at good prices both for basic services and extras (like static ip). It also offered Europe Servers and I was lucky enough to find a 50% off promotion ("50off"). The company is
DowntownHost
.
The website is on a Level3 network which is quite fast, I never had problems with components that at certain times consume a lot of memory (like Phoca Gallery, when creating thumbnails - of large galleries, also) and the support has been very effective and fast to pick up the ticket (a matter of minutes in vast majority of cases). When asking support, I've usually dealt with three employees there. Only had some minor complaints with one of them, on whom I happen to stumble whenever I contact them after midinight (Athens time)...he seems to read the support tickets in a hasty way and often asks for information that is given in the first message (for me repeating is tiring, but then again I do write lengthy texts).
bbernat117 wrote:
I am looking for full service -- I don't want to install my own Joomla,
DowntownHost offers Cpanel and Softaculous, which makes the whole business of installing software very easy.
However, if you require such personalized service like having Joomla installed for you, you might have to get it at an extra cost.