I believe 1&1 still uses PHP4 on their plans by default. There is documentation on their site about how to switch to PHP5. Be careful with them, they limit databases to a maximum of 100 megabytes.

I've seen a lot of people bit by bargain-basement shared hosting, including HostGator and 1&1. Always make sure to read the TOS for a hosting company to know where those limits on "unlimited" are. If you plan to get a lot of traffic, also be careful because SilverStripe can be heavy at times, and many shared hosts automatically suspend sites with heavy CPU usage.

Furthermore, avoid any companies owned by Endurance International Group (BizLand, FatCow, PowWeb, and iPowerWeb among 20+ brands they market under). I've personally experienced the disservice from one of their brands, and have heard horror stories from those who have used their other brands.

I've heard very good things about MonteCarloHosting, and their resource allocations are quite reasonable for the price.

Thanks for the following answer.

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golf clubs

godaddy was a nightmare in general. I've switched a lot of personal wordpress powered sites to media temple and it's been fantastic. user management, multiple domains, ssh access - everything is a breeze. only issue is access php error logs is a PITA. I don't' have first hand experience running SS on my mediatemple server (I run SS on my work server which is in-house) but I see no reason why it wouldn't be a breeze. I realized in the end that you get what you pay for and in the hosting market there is a lot of very cheap and very bad hosting. media temple starts at $200/year but it is well worth it.

http://www.mediatemple.net

One other option is the Rackspace Cloud. It's about the same price as MediaTemple, and also very good. We use them at work for some of our customers, and it's been a very stable platform. They also have very responsive support (one current ticket we put in with MediaTemple has an eta of 12 hours for response - we've never had more than two hours wait on a ticket and ten minutes on live chat).