I looked and looked and looked for a good host to mirror our setup outside London ...

Finally, I found Below Zero in Scotland next to the Internet Exchange who offer excellent customer service and loads of extras like MRTG graphs to monitor your bandwidth. They're worth checking out!

They only do co-lo as well, so they don't get caught up with DNS changes and all that ...

http://below0.net

london will be one of the best places to find internet hosting companies, simply because of LINX (London Internet Exchange).

although you may find some companies in Manchester offering a good quality service due to MINX (Manchester Internet Exchange)

I couldnt be sure about scotland, but i can probably say the response from scotland will be slower than that of MINX or LINX, simply because everything has to be routed through MINX and LINX.

I cant comment on individual people since i have not had experience, but location is very important since the UK network is far less advanced than that of the USA

That used to be the case but there are two Internet Exchanges in Scotland now and ScotIX (the official one) makes a huge difference to the infrastructure ... these guys are fast even though they're not peering at ScotIX (they say it will be soon)

It's a shockingly bad site though :-)

inflow.com have a Dublin data centre and they're keen to do deals.. email me if you want some details...