Had just had the unpleasant task of changing hosting companies twice in a month. My old host was in Australia, and with most of our business coming from the US, it made sense to move it over. I went with Arvixe on a tip from one of the SS team, and it wasn't a pleasant experience.

Posted the cautionary tale to my blog in case it saves anyone else grief: http://www.geoffmcqueen.com/2011/10/03/moving-web-hosts-from-the-frying-pan-into-the-arvixe-fire/

TL;DR version - I went with Dreamhost and have been happy so far (uptime report attached - changed to Dreamhost on the 30th)

Hello,

I'm sorry for your issues. Per my research, it appears that you were on the ostrich server. I can assure you that at Arvixe, large server side issues reach management very quickly. Some are easy to resolve and some take time. Whether at Arvixe, Dreamhost, Bluehost, etc. you are being placed on a single server out of hundreds or thousands under management. Your experience with that specific company's hosting services is summed up by not only their ability to properly manage the servers but also other customers' level of activity on the specific server.

I can agree with you that Ostrich has had some minor issues within the past week or so in regards to slower PHP processing. However, I would ask you to be reasonable in your assessment that a we had a server down for 5 days straight. The entire output looks a bit off when you have 5 days with literally no uptime (which has never happened in the history of Arvixe).

I'm attaching an uptime report for that server for the past 31 days. The uptime report uses the Nagios monitoring system setup in Seattle to ping the server every minute. This certainly only checks for the server's uptime. But for any monitoring system to be accurate, it needs to do not only minute by minute monitoring but also outline exactly what is being checked. Is the HTTP status code being checked? IF so, which status codes outline downtime and which status codes outline uptime? Or is it just ping? Do you know for a fact your monitoring system does minute by minute monitoring? Also, heavy access to the server can be considered abusive by the server firewall and therefore, the monitoring system could get blocked causing the monitoring system to show the extended downtime you are seeing.

To date, out of ~300 servers under management, not a single server has exhibited the level downtime shown in your report. I would welcome you to take a free account from me on a different server (or the same) and use a variety of monitoring services to monitor the service so that at the very least, you are left with a neutral feeling towards our services. I have no doubt that we'll be able to change your mind. And I can assure you that if you did end up on a poorly performing server on dreamhost and placed a post or blog post on the internet, you would not have someone from their management approaching you this quickly which I hope spreaks a bit to our concern for quality and excellence.

The screenshot mentioned above is attached. What I believe is the most important is the average uptime of a host's servers across a large number of different accounts and servers. There is one site that does a good job of taking each host's customers' domains when they leave a review and monitoring them to come up with an aggregated uptime report. That is available here: http://uptime.besthostratings.com/webhosts-uptime.php