That's precisely why I find sites like WebHostingTalk.com so valuable. You can talk with others who are interested in all sorts of Web Hosting-related informat

That's precisely why I find sites like WebHostingTalk.com so valuable. You can talk with others who are interested in all sorts of Web Hosting-related information, moreover, you get to actually converse with some of the web hosting providers' owners. I spend most of my time on the WHT forums in the colo section, and you see plenty of specific threads trying to find the most applicable type of hosting for a particular need ("Looking for a strong 20mbps colo host in Chicago. What do you guys recommend?"). You also get pretty much first-notices of downtimes there, and you even get the sweet notices of the stories such as the big break-in at CIHost chicago several years ago (where the crooks sawed through the wall, tazed the employees, and stole a bunch of servers, meanwhile CIHost was initially claiming that there was just an outage).