[_ck_]

Sending email to hotmail and aol accounts is impossible from any host that you can’t setup a proper rDNS and more importantly SPF.

SPF is critical (only gmail seems immune – thanks google, whew). If hotmail doesn’t see SPF or doesn’t like it, you’re screwed. Microsoft also caches the SPF results so if you change it, you have to write a support message to them and wait a week until someone sees it.

As far as host reliability, here’s my strange take on it over the years: you’ll never find a large host that you’ll be happy with. They all have issues. If someone thinks their large host is perfect they either just have been lucky or not with them long enough. Large hosts are constantly changing employees so customer service quality varies tremendously. And the more you need customer service on any host, the more you are in trouble.

For bbpress (and wordpress) make sure you find a host with locally attached storage to the server and not NFS like Dreamhost which makes file access very slow. There’s no caching module like wp-cache for bbpress so file access is even more critical.

The two first big questions I always ask are: what kind of hardware is my server running on and how many neighbors will I have. Backup quality is probably the next question. Everything else is either hype or irrelevant IMHO. You might also ask if the host is within their own datacenter and can literally reach out and touch their own hardware if they need to replace a hard drive or if they are at the mercy of yet another third party’s technical support to do it for them.

If you can afford it, get your own VPS with a low number of neighbors on the same node. But that’s definitely more expensive than shared hosting so you have to be willing to pay for it. At least with VPS you can migrate the entire setup within the same host fairly easily if your neighbors turn out to be abusive.