I know that this might sound like advertising but it is a personal experience.
I administer
www.longhaircareforum.com which is a community of ladies that want to achieve long healthy hair. When I got involved in the site we moved from a host to aplushosting where we got their deluxe package (26Gb transfer a month). Since then (start of January) the site has nearly doubled in posts and rose a third in users. We saw a couple of problems with our database at the end of February that resulted in some data lost but we thought that that would be a one off.
Yesterday and without any warning the host shut down our site. After numerous emails they were not prepared to bring it up. They were telling me that the CPU is nearly maxing out and they could not figure out what was wrong. They shut down our MySQL and UBBT and they said that UBBT is really heavy on the server (there you go pigs fly across that ridge). Still with those two shut their CPU was still at 80% at which point I pointed out that there might be the web hits they get... It was indeed their web server (Zeus and not apache would you believe it).
Time was running short so I remembered Jeremy's (msula) hosting company. The replies to my email were within 10 minutes tops. The account was created within 15 minutes and in all I started transferring via FTP the data 45 minutes after my first email. Support was responding within 5 minutes and the whole move worked out only 2 hours.
I must say that I was gladly surprised and provided that all goes as we expect I don't see us moving hosts for a long time.
AKD96 - Choosing your host is a big decision and sometimes a costly one because a cheap host might not mean a reliable one. I really hope you achieve your goal of a dedicated host.
