Hey Internet, I need some advice. I’ve been using Yahoo as a hosting provider for about a year and I’ve been largely happy. I’ve been very impressed by their ability to weave together a bunch of independent services and software into one very reasonable control panel and make the common things pretty easy. For new users of such things, I would still recommend it. But in the last couple months, I’ve gotten increasingly frustrated with a few aspects of the Yahoo service.

First, I’ve been trying to set up a sitemap for this blog (on WordPress, running at a subdomain mapped into a folder). Yahoo does not allow access to any url rewriting files and without that, it is not possible (according to them) for me to install a sitemap anywhere that can be seen or is valid for this blog. It still may be possible, but I’m tired of messing with it. For similar reasons, I have not been able to switch my feeds to feedburner.

The last straw is that over the past week or so, I’ve been getting a ton of 500 errors on the site. Yahoo support is slow at best (takes days to get a first response) so I’m not sure whether this is something that will get resolved or not. In any case, the current level of problems is unacceptable.

So, I’m looking at other hosting providers, but there are so many zillions of them that I have to rely on some sort of personal recommendation, which is where you come in. I have relatively modest space and bandwidth requirements, probably well within any basic plan’s limits. I need MySQL, PHP, WordPress (preferably installed for me), email, subdomains, and FTP/SCP, backups – all pretty basic. Java and/or Ruby support would be nice although I have no need for it right now. I would love to have WordPress installed/updated automatically and backups done automatically. And I want great support in the case that stuff breaks.

So, any thoughts? Please, only recommend something if you’ve actually used it, not if you’ve just heard about it.