Looking for [Grid/Cloud/Clustered] High Availability UK Linux Hosting
I am looking for a new web hosting company to host our corporate websites. Over past 8 years or so I have tried several hosts, but yet to find a decent one worth sticking with. The market is absolutely saturated so googling is rather pointless as usually the worst hosts (1&1, Fasthosts, UK2) are ranked the highest.
I'm not after a sales pitch from a bedroom host touting for business on here, I'm just after some honest feedback so I can find a host with a decent service and support. The website I am looking to move has been active for about 7 years, they are very reluctant to switch hosts in fear of downtime due to problems during migration, so I need to pick the right host first time, otherwise they may never move away from the comedians at Fasthosts.
We want the reliability and availability of a managed dedicated server, but we can't really justify it for hosting one website receiving 5000 unique visitors a month (25000 page views) - we clearly only need the power of shared hosting.
Besides, there isn't the budget available to move to managed dedicated hosting, so I was thinking we could pick up an unmanaged dedicated server very cheaply. But if I were to leave the company, or take time off for holiday/sickness, and there was a problem with the server they would be screwed.
Recently there have been hosts offering Clustered/Grid/Cloud hosting. The problem is all of the ones I have found are only offering hosting in the US. I like the look of Mosso, a Rackspace company, but they only offer US hosting. Another problem is the word "Cloud" has become a marketing executives wet dream, I see the word describing everything to do with the internet - even if the service has nothing to do with clustered high availability servers.
Can anyone recommend a decent reliable UK hosting company? Our budget is about £1000 a year. Our only requirement is PHP 5.2.x and MySQL 5.x running on a Linux server, but that is to be expected. A bonus would be if they offered Ruby on Rails and Python too, but it isn't a requirement.
Thanks. :)