A couple of things:<p>If you follow tech news, you'll notice that every major cloud based service has experienced some level of down time, so while you should "avoid" shared hosts like HostGator (I think this goes without saying), you shouldn't expect that just because you go with a cloud service like MediaTemple, Amazon, Heroku, etc, you don't need to plan for possible outages. MT also had their fair share of issues back when they were getting started. Amazon has had some well publicized issues. Both of these wouldn't be an issue for those who engineer their systems properly.<p>It's hard to beat simplicity when it comes to reliability. We don't need the scaling capabilities of cloud services, so we go with simple VPSs. Our primary hosting is straight forward VPS systems hosted with a provider colocated at Colo4 in Dallas. I've had systems with them for 5 years now and I've never experienced a failure. We still maintain redundant services in a Freemont data center just in case.
HostGator does random license/identity checks on customers? What kind of idiocy is that?<p>If you sell an service with 'instant' in the name, it had better be. Let them get started instantly. If you want to do random checks on content, go for it. But don't piss off your customers before they've even started. Especially if they've got any weight in the industry.