I've been through a lot of different hosting companies over the years, for both my own personal site and my clients. Some have been good, some have been simply awful.

Recently, I stumbled across one that seems to hit the mark right-on. Dreamhost.

I was first attracted to their plans. Their base plan includes all the goodies: 200 GB of storage (increases weekly), 2 TB of monthly throughput (increases weekly), unlimited mySQL databases, unlimited domains, unlimited email addresses, full shell access, and the first domain registration is free!

Then I read through some of the stories from current members. They are thrilled with the service as well ... Dreamhost has one of the best web control panels available. You can do so much with the control panel that there are literally warnings like "do not touch this if you don't know what you're doing" ... the customization is unbelievable!

Should you mess up or something isn't working right, they have a comprehensive support documentation site ... as well as a very good forum community. And if you're still lost, you can even call them and get live support!

They also give you free stuff ... this is on-top of the weekly disk space and bandwidth increases (first place I've seen that perk). Since I've been hosted there, they've quadrupled my diskspace and throughput ... for no other reason than they could! They are constantly upgrading their systems, and adding new features their customers want.

There is a 97-day money-back guarantee (short of the free domain registration, which they'll charge a measly $9.95) ... so if you don't like how things are working out, you can cancel with no strings attached!

And if all that isn't good enough, they have a referral system. Basically you have a choice to get a one-time referral bonus for each new person, or take a percentage of their payments for life! It doesn't take long before your entire hosting is paid for (or more). Even if this didn't exist, though, I'd still refer everyone to Dreamhost ... they are that good.

So do your site and your customers a favor ... choose Dreamhost and tell them I sent you!