I would be interested if any of you know of any top quality hosts that have both virtual hosting capabilities and managed virtual dedicated or managed dedicated hosting. Would a company like this be likely to give lower priority support to its (smaller) virtual hosting customers? IF I am successful, and my bandwidth requirements increase suddenly, I would prefer to be able to make a smooth transition. I assume that changing to a different host would be a much more troublesome transition?

I will be putting up my first web site soon and it seems like it might be a big advantage to start with a host that can easily let me expand without having a huge crisis if bandwidth needs soar unexpectedly. I would like to be able to go from virtual hosting to virtual dedicated hosting to dedicated hosting if and when the need occurs. In any case, I would need full support so I can focus on my web site and not worry about the server. I am an environmental scientist with another full time career so I don't see myself staying up till 4AM every night trying to learn how to maintain a server or actually maintaining it. Some posts on this site imply that there is no such thing as a managed dedicated server, but that doesn't make sense to me because I would think there would be a market for it. Now I see a recent thread where it is being discussed.

Well, the most important thing for me will still be good customer service and quality and reliability of the overall operation. So can any of you recommend a high quality web host that offers both virtual hosting AND either heavily managed virtual dedicated or heavily managed dedicated server hosting?

Thanks.

There are indeed hosts around who are able to provide managed servers. But negotiate carefully what you are responsible for and what the host is responsible for. And if you want a 100% sorrow free server this will cost $.