Burton Web Hosting – my (poor) experience

When it comes to choosing a new product or service I always prefer to go with a recommendation from somebody who has used the product/service and has had a positive experience. So when I was looking for a new web host last week Patrick Altoft recommended Burton Web Hosting. That was good enough for me as Patrick has had a lot of sites and articles that have done well in Digg, so when he posted the following on my blog I was sold.

I pay £10 a month for unmetered bandwidth on a host that stands up to the digg effect without caching or crashing. Try Burton Hosting in Scarborough.

So I go to sign up to Burton Hosting and it all seems straightforward until I get to the actual page where I have to enter my address and credit card details. Its quite a long page but after about 5 minutes I completed it and hit "enter". I then get this message:

An error has occurred and your order cannot be processed at this time. Please try again later. (3049 : The StartDate format is invalid. The value was 03/08.)

Oh dear. So I hit "try again" and after another 5 minutes of filling in all of my details I hit "enter" and get exactly the same error message! This time I double checked my credit card information really carefully and am 100% sure that I get everything right. But at this point I can't be bothered to fill in the bloody form again so I decide to ring their support desk. Its 5.30pm, and I get an answerphone message saying that there is nobody there to speak to so leave a message. Not good. I look around the site and find a few other numbers for the switchboard and for named personnel contacts and I try them but find they are disconnected!! Its at this point that I give up on Burton Hosting and head off to find another web host that is reasonable and has unlimited monthly transfers. Any suggestions? UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who has commented so far. I already have some of my major sites with Rackspace, and I agree they are great, but not cheap. My other less important sites are with 1&1 on a shared server. However for this particular project I wanted a new host that is cheap and cheerful and can handle lots of bandwidth. So since I wrote this original post I have decided to go with Servage as per Ray's recommendation. I'm pleased to say the sign up process was easy and I only paid £63 for 14 months of web hosting that included a .com domain, 510GB of space and 5010GB of monthly data transfer, that should do the job :) And they have a pretty good affiliate scheme whereby if you use the voucher code ukoffer when signing up, you will get 25GB of extra storage. And I get two months of credit toward my hosting balance plus 25GB of extra web space. What I'm listening to right now: R Kelly – "I’m A Beast"