learnt the hardway over the years. Started on shared servers with small companies, which normally means poor to bad technical support.
Moved to dedicated servers, but unfortunately even with a brand name, technical support was terrible, which actually led to legal action. Their techies couldn't handle apache loadbalancing, and we had numerous outages which was damaging our reputation.
Moved to EV1 Servers 3 years ago, which was then taken over by the
Dedicated Servers | Managed Dedicated Server Hosting and havent had any unscheduled downtime. We have multiple dedicated servers with them, they handle all hardware, O/S patching, backups and Disaster Recovery.
Cant praise them enough, their support guys are on the ball, and any problem tickets are responded to in minutes. Last server was ordered at 17.30 and was ready for content load by 09.30 the following day. That included custom spec hardware, so the machine had to built upto our spec.
I know of certain Blue Chip outfit's that can only dream of those kind of turn around times
