Nexcess, based outside of Detroit, is a family business that grew big. (On some ISPs there is a very direct, fast route between Milwaukee and Nexcess servers, which is nice.) They have their own first-rate data center, and the owners frequently handle even the lowliest customer support issues.

Nexcess has a basic shared server package that's competitive with any other, and I've had no complaints with its performance. They do not overcrowd their servers, and they have decent VPS deals as well as dedicated plans. Nexcess has their own unique server control interface, InterWorx, that is quite good. The only serious service problem I have ever had at Nexcess is one shared account being affected in a sub-critical way by a seemingly erroneous spam blacklist entry involving another site that had nothing to do with Nexcess. Nexcess got on that right away.

Nexcess' tech support is personable, good at listening and explaining; they are very accommodating and directly involved on-site with the actual hardware hosting your site. The first time I used Nexcess, I had the standard permission problems with Joomla, so I requested suPHP and got it very quickly too. The support people I dealt with directly didn't seem familiar with Joomla or suPHP at the time, but someone else working with them was, or else they made the effort to become familiar with both tools. Later, when I worked with additional accounts at Nexcess, I was able to ask for suPHP right after purchased them, and it got taken care of right away. I have never experienced or heard of customer service anywhere close to this good for basic shared hosting services.

On the downside, this level of service was not consistent and seemed to fall off in 2008. I had to make requests for suPHP more than once, and one time an account was moved without warning or notice after the fact to a differently configured server, which broke things. Rather than configure servers to run common PHP/mySQL applications properly and securely, I had one technician recommend a "solution" that is a bonehead move for security but frequently used by shoddy hosts. That dropped my view of NEXCESS enormously, but eventually persistence paid off and things were set right.

Nexcess maintains really good uptime and response time figures for even their lowest-priced shared accounts.