DreamHost

★★★★☆

I’ve hosted all my personal websites (including this one!) at DreamHost for over a decade now. Their VPS service (a virtual machine with a managed OS+web stack, but completely flexible within userspace, with an optional managed MySQL server) has been rock solid since the mid-2010s, and when problems do come up, tech support is on it quickly, friendly and informative. They support easy WordPress installs on their web hosting, plus a managed WordPress hosting service (that I haven’t tried).

Their cloud computing service has been less stable, though, and after waiting a while for problems to shake out, I tried out a few dedicated cloud providers and settled on Linode (review) for better stability, decent prices, and more datacenter choices.

Update: I’ve been mostly happy with DreamHost’s email service. It’s been reliable (despite seeing connectivity outage notifications on a regular basis, email is async so I haven’t been affected by it in the couple of years since I switched back to DreamHost from Gmail as my primary). The web interface is really usable and (since I’m already paying for the account) isn’t cluttered up with ads. The only problem I’ve had with is with spam filtering: I get a lot more false positives and false negatives than I did with Gmail, and just marking or moving the message isn’t enough to train the filters. And the way the filters work makes it difficult to report to SpamCop, even with mail sent directly to DreamHost and not via my forwarding address.