I'm a web developer who's had clients on pretty much every major host at one time or another. I don't spend much time with their hosts though, because it's usually just a matter of uploading and viewing stuff. The only thing that affects me are the sometimes hilariously slow ftp speeds and the occasional irritating mysql configuration.
I resell for a couple of them as a way to pay for my own hosting fees, so for my own stuff I've used two prior hosts over the years, both major companies most people will be familiar with (lets call them Dream* and Go*)
Both the above guys I was with offered pretty much the lowest rates and unlimited everything, which was nice. Go* has the most atriocious and impossible to use control panel I've ever seen in my life, and I switched away from them because it made me want to cut myself when navigating it. Also, they were annoying in general, shoving ads everywhere.
The other, Dream*, were actually pretty good to me. Their support was nice, they have a custom control panel that's nicer than cpanel, good one click installs, SSH access by default, free reselling, and I was with them for I think about 6 or 7 years.
So I have nothing against them and recommend them if you're on a budget and want unlimited everything...
BUT... their servers were too damn slow and their VPS package was not much better (and required me to purchase a separate mysql package if I didn't want to be on a terribly slow shared database host). Any page of mine that required database queries (especially wordpress) took too many seconds to load. Their speed gradually worse over the years as I'm sure my shared host computer got bogged down with customers' garbage, and I eventually got annoyed enough to leave.
So I read reviews for a few hours and stumbled on hawkhost. I went with it becaus of the reviews, because they're NOT unlimited (I don't need unlimited and don't want people slowing my server down), and the well priced reseller options. A bit over a month in, and having transferred most of my sites, I'm glad I did. The server is blazing fast on most page loads. I can tell you which host I'm FTPing files to just by the speed of the transfer, the difference is that big.
I had/have one strange problem where about 1 in 50 page views the page appears to hang, but I can't reproduce it reliably. This gave me a chance to test support with some questions and the response was great. Quick and friendly.
If I had to make one complaint, it's that I don't like cpanel very much, some of the off the shelf addons for it like RVthemes are confusing and pretty junky, but once I sorted out how to work around that it doesn't matter. Almost all the other hosts I tried use it too, so it's not much of a complaint.
