In case anyone else is interested I have had the following suggestions and am looking at them all. I had forgotten to change the settings file in my domain ... but that is fixed now.
******************* I've been really happy with Rackspace Cloud sites. Lots of storage, and the uptime on one commercial site I have is at almost 300 days
I had some sites on Hostmonster, and some on Linode. Both were good.
I had some sites on Hostmonster, +1
We use Linode for some staging and production, and have heard great things about (and will be using) Blackmesh for higher traffic projects.
I keep my sites on dreamhost, running slowly. I think there is RAM issue, but amount of RAM per hosting account is top secret. I have few static sites, 4 Drupals and 5 Joomlas, all very small traffic. Last year they were fine, this year after few hardware problems, I was off line for 2-3 days ( all together) they moved to new hardware...and I am considering moving elsewhere. I use their shared hosting ( not recommended for drupal ), website is http://www.tkstudiodesign.comwww.tkstudiodesign.com if you want to have a look how it works
I had hosted some Drupal sites on GoDaddy and they were very slow, so I decided to try BlueHost for a trial period and the difference was amazing. Not as fast as high end sites, for sure, but still... much faster.
I like hostgator.com and I have had very good support with them they have even helped me resolve some problems.
*************** The sites I am concerned about are: http://www.HeavenSentDesserts.com http://www.RandallHouseRareBooks.com this latter had to come online long before it's finished. I had a programmer work with me on loading our own db and being able to use it for our "Products" and he has abandoned me after 50% of the work is done ... he did a module which is only partially working, to upload ca. 5,500 books, all individual titles, and being able to display them, search on them, etc. and I don't have the php or sql knowledge to finish it. We also have paid already a lot to the disappearing programmer, and funds are low ...
We are hosted on GoDaddy, the "web grid" -whatever that means. The sites seem slow to me and I wonder what experience others have with other hosting companies? How much support to expect and speed.
thanks,
Pia