Well if you don't trust the big review sites you at least recognize bullshit when you see it. That said, my startup is trying to give an actual unbiased look at

Well if you don't trust the big review sites you at least recognize bullshit when you see it. That said, my startup is trying to give an actual unbiased look at what people think about web hosting companies. It works by aggregating and analyzing twitter sentiment about all those brands you mentioned (it only works on bigger guys who get enough volume of discussion). Take a look http://www.reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare http://www.reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare HostGator/BlueHost is a near identical product from the same company (EIG) and the quality is quite low. GoDaddy doesn't have that much better of a reputation but it's really hard to tell sometimes between quality of their service and people who don't like them because of what they've done in the past (sopa, elephant killing, advertising, etc). Doesn't help that they are huge either. AWS is expensive if you're comparing it to shared hosting. They are nowhere near the same product. AWS is great if you need AWS features and are a technical person who can handle all that (or afford paying a lot for support/someone who can). The other companies are providing management/support. If you goal is installing owncloud my first question would be are you going to install/manage it or not? That generally cuts down which companies might make sense.