Heading down hillfor a while now
I have been with fasthosts for 4 years on a low end Linux home package and have noticed that performance and reliability have been steadily getting worse. My email was down recently for the best part of a day and when it came back up service was intermitent. Im surprised to hear people on dedicated servers are having problems too as I wouldve thought fasthosts would at least take care of their premium customers.
It seems like they are hell bent on overloading their servers and network to breaking point to squeeze as much profit as possible.
Looking for quality web hosting reviews is a mine field, i spent a whole weekend trying to find an unbiased (un affiliated) review site or one that didnt have just as many positive posts as negative for each host.
In the end I choose to go with a linux xen virtual server from MemSet. It costs about twice what I was paying fasthosts but I can do so much more with it and so far its been very reliable (time will tell) and support has been outstanding, questions by email (I dont pay for phone support) are usually answered within the hour and responses often go beyone the "basic technical support" service I pay for.
The main selling point for me when choosing Memset for my hosting was the 1month rolling contract, I figured if they dont lock me into a year long contract they have more incentive to pride a consistent service. As far as I could find they were one of the only hosts to offer this (especially on virtual/dedicated servers)