Here is a poll of some of the best known hosts online, please vote or post a recommendation or experience with them. Just for fun.

Remember this is "best", so if you've had bad experiences, you'd probably not want to vote for them. Choose more than one if you like.

I've had good experiences with:

Hostgator
One & One

Bad experiences with:
IXWebhosting < Worst in the world. Guaranteed downtime at least 15 minutes a day, same time each day. (rebooting? Why?). Taken my domains offline due to exceeding unlimited bandwidth?!? There are dedicated blogs and domains set-up for IX hating...
Heart internet < I had server space issues, not having ability to upload files when it's reported I still have diskspace. Also, some downtime, but nothing in the league of IX. And some guys here speak highly of Heart...  

It'd be interesting to read other peoples good and bad experiences.. .

I have also never had a single problem with Fasthosts.

I was going to add fasthosts along with some others off the top of my head but only 10 poll questions available..

I used to host my websites with 1&1 but I recently switched to M6.net. One of my friends opened up an account with 1&1 a few years ago, but he got busy with college so he gave me the account. I never received proper ownership of the 1&1 account and I needed Windows hosting so I switched to M6. They have some pretty good rates and are very reliable with customer service and server uptime. So far, I have no complaints with them.

Hi  

I've had my huge site hosted with Esosoft for the past 9 years and they've never
been down.  Support is answered immediately and they offer everything!  Plus you
get 1000 MB of disk space, spam assassin, and so much more.  My site has a lot of
hits and download and there's never been a problem with transfer limits.  Great cgi-bin.

All the web sites I design and maintain I recommend to host there and the clients do.

My two cents worth  

I can't comment on the other providers but Heart runs well until THEY disable it for using more than 5% of the CPU despite paying for an UNLIMITED reseller account !

They have shut down my forum AGAIN today - they say it was being spammed but guests are unable to post and new memberships have been disabled for 18 months now - I think I need to find a new host, please vote above so I know who to choose  

Quoted Text

Our systems administrators have had to disable this site. The forum was being spammed and causing a high load on the server and using more than 5% CPU. It may be worth considering deleting the forum and starting again with added security to prevent this from happening in the future

I can't say I'd vote for any of these.  I try to stay away from the big bulk hosts and stick to personalized business class hosts that are small enough to forge a one on one relationship with.  Their prices may seem larger on paper but a lot more service is included than is on the site usually.  They work for some people but most people go around looking at the stats and high numbers and "unlimited" bandwidth these places say they provide, and half the people who buy into it don't have any clue that they'll never use anywhere near that amount.  Not to mention everyone's so obsessed with paying the bottom dollar possible for hosting and then is surprised when something goes wrong.  My personal take.

In response to jrjiri. I wouldn't go for a small host. In this competitive market, in the current economic climate, I wouldn't trust that a small host wouldn't go under and leave me stranded with my files lost.
I see the meaning in supporting the little guy, but I cannot take the risk in small hosts. As much as I resent myself for that...

In response to Uncle Jack, I tend to agree. My host has a limit of 25 processes and 25% CPU usage for over 60 seconds, (Which is INCREDIBLY hard to exceed. I run a niche search engine that's regularly crawling, several forums, many databases, mirror many many sites and have a couple of image hosting sites that convert images on user upload into 3 different sizes and have not exceeded the limit.).

In response to Marie2rob, I've never heard of them. If they're serving you well, then excellent. But 9 years in this business without being known is unusual. Stats say most fail or become big, if EcoSoft have maintained a roughly level grade all those years it's unusual, but nice one! .

I will try Hostgator  

I have 5 different domains i own, two that use eblah. i host them all with http://hosting.aplus.net I have used them for the last seven years and cannot say enough good stuff about them.

Quoted from unclejack

I can't comment on the other providers but Heart runs well until THEY disable it for using more than 5% of the CPU despite paying for an UNLIMITED reseller account !

They have shut down my forum AGAIN today - they say it was being spammed but guests are unable to post and new memberships have been disabled for 18 months now - I think I need to find a new host, please vote above so I know who to choose  

OK in fairness to Heart, the problems yesterday were caused by a hacking attempt - they were unsuccessful but caused the overload on the server hence the reason Heart disabled the account.

aww, the "my own server" host isn't up there :-P

I actually have only used 1 host other than myself and that was when I worked for a web developing company. From there I learned how to do things myself and to me (in the long run) it is a bit cheaper for me to do it myself.

Hosing your own server isn't on the list because it's not a webhost, also everyone's server configurations are far too varied for an rating to be valid.

I would love to host all my sites myself, the problem for most is the upload speed...
I have 8Mb broadband that gives me 4Mb downwards and 1Mb upwards, it's simply not fast enough to host most websites...

Is this poll for best shared web host? Rackspace kind of stands out from all the rest, they are more managed solutions / dedicated servers.