I used to be with Media Temple and I never really had an issues using them, it was their Grid Server offering and pretty decent for the price. After a while I y

I used to be with Media Temple and I never really had an issues using them, it was their Grid Server offering and pretty decent for the price. After a while I yearned for more control and power, so I moved to a 512mb Linode VPS plan which including their excellent backup plan costs me $25 per month. I host around 12 sites (mostly Wordpress sites) and it can handle everything that has been thrown at it thus far. Keep in kind a managed VPS plan from Linode means no Cpanel or fancy control panel so everything needs to be done via the command line. Perfect if you want to better understand Linux and learn command line commands. The backup service is a separate offering that's $5 per month and I highly recommend it as you'll most likely destroy a few VM instances before you get the hang of how to configure things like server requests and email. From my experience Linode is definitely one of the best and cheap. It's perfect bridging hosting between shared hosting and expensive cloud based dedicated VM hosting like EC2. Rackspace is also pretty good, I have friends who swear by them but can't say anything about them really as I've never used them.