I have been changing hosts very often until I finally found reliablehosting.com.

These guys have been in the hosting business since 1996. This is longer than Google and longer than most of other hosting companies. It is an experienced company with 1400+ servers and 50'000 hosted domains. They are not resellers. They are the real deal.

Reliable Hosting server room

• You can host multiple domains on 1 account and share the same webspace and bandwidth with your other domains.
  This kind of sharing is not obvious. Even if some other companies say that "you can add domains" to your account, they require you to specify the exact amount of webspace/traffic you will use for each of your domains separately. That means that if you are over the limit for one domain it stops to function, while the others may be way under their limits.

• They offer Urchin stats (for a one time fee), and other stats packages, too. My old company charged me $ every month.

• The staff is very helpful.

• They offer CPanel accounts. CPanel is a great management utility that let's you manage all aspects of your account: Email forwarding, addition of new domains, installation of forums, setup of databases.

• Reliable Hosting is one of internet's Top3000 websites. That's very good for a hosting company.

• They host ten thousands of sites. In other words:

  • They have experience with small and big problems

  • They won't disappear suddenly (some hosters get your money and off they go)

  • They are good (otherwise less companies would host with them)

  • They won't get slower and slower. Some hosters (especially those with a low Alexa rank) are fast in the beginning, but as they grow their websites have to share the bandwidth.

• They allow sex. That means you don't get banned if you have pictures of Greek statues or blonde jokes.

• They offer bandwidth protection: Protection against hotlinking (others link to your .jpg instead to your .htm). Throttles (optional) against bandwidth overages.

• You can host foreign domains, too (.cc, .de, .co.uk...)

Watch out! Raving newbies have no clue...

I have read many postings about different hosting companies and a lot of them sound like this:

"Wow, I just signed up and I can't believe how easy that was. I am a newbie and you guys really helped me with setting up my webpage"

Sounds good? Read again! He merely wrote this:

"Wow, I just signed up (= he doesn't know sh*t how fast and reliable it will be in the months to come) and I can't believe how easy that was (= he doesn't know what happens if there are real problems). I am a newbie (= he has only newbie questions) and you guys really helped me with setting up my webpage (= they told him how to fix broken links to images)".

What means downtime?

I suppose you use Google quite often. Let me ask you: How often does it happen that a site from the search results is OFFLINE? Very rarely.
In other words: As soon as Google finds out your site is down you get kicked off the index. And how often does Google check your site for being reachable? Up to several times per day.

Thus there is nothing (NOTHING!) worse than being offline for whatever reason.

Will you get penalized by Google for being on a slow server (I am not talking about Reliable Hosting now)? Maybe. Will you get penalized by Google for being unreachable? Hell, yeah, for sure!
It happened to me several times that I went offline for a few days (with other hosting companies) and it took maybe 1-2 years until Google forgot.

Other hosters don't care. They will tell you, that's "all your fault" (happened to me), or that "there have been hackers" (happened to me) or that "the server crashed" (happened to me) but "unfortunately all data backups have been lost, too" (happened to me). I don't make things up right now. Once my site went offline and the hoster didn't react for one full month to my emails.
None of these problems can be foreseen when you sign-up. It's a long-term-experience. Thus save yourself the trouble, stop hoster-hopping and choose what I chose.

Be aware of 99.5% uptime guarantee. 0.5% means your site is offline for 4 hours per month.

What means downtime?

If you need to register a domain name then go to advanced-domain-registration.com. I would suggest you transfer ALL your existing domains to advanced-domain-registration.com since they are very cheap and have tons of features (e.g. hiding your whois info, so no spammer will get your email address).