I’ve had moderate range of experience with various hosting companies so I thought I would share some of them here. I am sure many have more negative or positive experiences with these companies so I recommend just going out there and doing research for yourself.
I used this service when I was based in the UK and still use it for a couple of domains as of today. When I hosted my website there I rarely had any downtime, I don’t have any downtime for the email accounts I have there now. The customer service experience has been pretty positive, only had to phone them once and my issue was expedited pretty quickly. The only issue I have with this company is their control panel and back end management appears to be something they have designed themselves. So, if you are used to the traditional cpanel then you might have an additional learning curve in getting used to their system.
A few years ago this service, I would say, would be the kiss of death to your business but there have been recent improvements. My colleagues would complain once you have your domain with them its near impossible to transfer it out. Again they are a very large company and there will be little personal attention unless you are on a business level account. I am personally no longer do business with them but have clients that do and have dealt with them on their behalf, that experience has been pretty positive especially with customer service or learning curve issues. We went through a period of very bad downtime but in the past 6 months that has improved and the WordPress sites hosted with them are at their most stable.
This is probably the worst company for customer service where they have no desire to resolve your technical issues but to sell you something you don’t need, it is extremely annoying. Eventually my client left them as they were becoming such a nuisance and not conducive to running a business. Having said that they had a more traditional cpanel and didn’t have much downtime.
This is where I have my websites. On the whole they are good most of the time but go through spates of downtime with little feedback as to the reasons for the outages and eta for a fix. I’ve also gone through a spate of issues with billing but it seems they have fixed their poor workflow now. From an infrastructure perspective, against a similar service that other hosts provides, they are much poorer especially around server resources. So, hosting larger WordPress sites can be an issue and if you plan to have a resource intensive site with many visitors then Hostgator may not be for you unless you have a more business level account.
I guess this company is best known for selling domain names but they do have hosting as well. Well, I had no end of problems with the hosting side of things with Enom. First, their customer support was totally chronic taking weeks if not months to respond to tickets. When they did respond, a miracle in itself, 80% of the time they would give the wrong advice which happened to me a number of occasions which lead to hours and hours of trying to reverse it. Then there were downtime issues with their MySQL database disconnecting from WordPress constantly. But, recently, as in the past 2 months, I have seen big improvements in downtime and customer service so hopefully they are back on track.
Summary
So I wouldn’t really want to recommend any of the above companies, not just because they are all awful but I would rather people make their own mind up. It really is hit and miss sometimes.