I've had experiences with the following hosting providers:<p>000webhost: Great free host for simple php applications. However, they don't give you SSH access and their servers do not handle spikes in web traffic very well.<p>Amazon EWS: Free tier for a year is nice, however you still have to pay 10 dollars a month if you want an elastic IP. Relatively expensive compared to other cloud hosting providers for small scale projects. Terrible customer support and convoluted usage reports.<p>Recently I've been thinking about buying a remote dedicated server or using rackspace cloud hosting.<p>What hosting do you use?
Moved from Slicehost (after they were acquired by Rackspace) to EC2. Check out the reserved instances offered by Amazon for EC2, this brought the cost down to compete with the Linode and Slicehost but with a more powerful machine on EC2.<p>Reserved instances:
<a href="http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances</a><p>I found the CPU time for micro instances to be sparse and unreliable to host an API for example.
VPSes from Frantech, QuickPacket, and QuickWeb.<p>I'd highly recommend checking out lowendstock.com - the freedom to use SSH and configure nginx however you please is fantastic. There are very few situations where shared hosting makes sense.
OVH.com, the biggest european hosting provider : Xeon i7 W3520, 24Go RAM, 2x120Go SSD (Intel SSD 320) in soft RAID-1, 130 €/m. PostgreSQL is really happy on this hardware :)<p>And online.net for HA.