I've been using Slicehost for almost 4 months now and have completely loved it. My web hosting "journey" started out with Dreamhost. Dreamhost looked great at the time because of it's insanely low pricing. I soon began to have issues with Dreamhost. First, it began to become slow and I thought it might be my Wordpress installation but, in the end, decided a large problem was Dreamhost's sub-par drives (that's what you get when you pay $5 for hundreds of gigs + hosting). Towards the end of my stay at Dreamhost, I began to have major issues with access to the server. Basically, Dreamhost provided me with PHP and basic static serving but I wanted to try out Ruby on Rails. After quite a bit of searching, I found MediaTemple, whose Grid Hosting was taking the market by storm. I still keep a MediaTemple account for quick, easy setup. Like many shared hosts though, MediaTemple doesn't give you much control over the server. I needed root access to do a lot of things on Rails (mainly to install several gems). After searching around I came upon Slicehost probably from Benjamin Golub, the developer of RSSMeme and FFTogo (needless to say, one of the best Python/Django developers on the net). So far I have had nothing but good times with Slicehost. I have never had to ask for any support (MediaTemple has the best support for a major company that I've ever had) but I get the sense that the Slicehost staff would jump on my problem. The thing about Slicehost is that any problem is probably your own fault since the server is completely open and started pretty much from scratch. Slicehost is by far my favorite host and I think they can keep it that way for quite awhile. (At least until Google AppEngine is fully out :P)