I'll be honest, my initial reactions to Liquid Web might've been a tad harsh. I've remained with them, and have found their service to be fairly reliable. For 24.95 a month, their connection appears to be nice and fast, the servers uptime is satisfactory (the longest I've seen so far is 15 days), and the features available are impressive. All current, non-beta releases of PHP4 and MySQL are available, and I haven't yet run into any problems with too many connection errors or other problems with that service. And WWWThreads installs and runs efficiently, from my tests. And 30gig a month bandwidth is one of the largest packages currently available on the virtual server market.
They were having problems with some slowness, but apparently they were having to deal with problems with illegal warez accounts, and some DoS attacks. But they've apparently cleared everything up, and things seem to run smoothly.
And server problems seem to be dealt with swiftly.
On the downside:
cgi-bin is located in the document tree, not the greatest in terms of security, but not much you can do about it.
All scripts run as apache user nobody, which can be a problem if you're using it to manage a mailing list. you receive no bounces.
I still can't figure out why it took so long for my e-mail to get set-up and running, and nobody in support could figure it out either.
Support doesn't really get a gold star. E-mail is usually answered in 24 hours, otherwise they have a phone support during the day. Answers are often very brief, and sometimes uninformative. Probably because the same guy is answering both support and sales calls. I've had some simple questions about their core software and technologies that they couldn't answer, and sounded as if they didn't know it even existed. So be prepared to be your own admin, as I wouldn't count on their trouble shooting capabilities. Know your scripts, and be prepared to seek help outside of their service.
They have no excess bandwidth provisions. If you exceed the 30gig per month, you cannot purchase more bandwidth. You either get shut down, or have to go to their dedicated server plan.
There's no real community forum where you can find out what's wrong with servers or how they fixed them.
But, in a world of really poor service providers, the service to dollar ratio really can't be beat. I plan on staying with them until I exceed their bandwidth capabilities.
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Shalazar
www.charisma-carpenter.com