Recently we switched our site (http://www.dadlabs.com) to buyhttp.com

I have no affiliation with buyhttp at all.  I give them high praise for both customer service and speed of page delivery.

Our site was painfully slow when it was on Netfirms.  Sometimes pages did not load at all.  I did a lot of what is recommended in the FAQ on the performance forum.  We even upgraded to semi-dedicated server.  Our angel investor was getting mad, and all was going to hell in a handbasket.  We then tried Media Temple, but media temple was running an old version of mysql and i had terrible database export/import problems.

So I read the joomla forums, found the list of providers that specifically work toward joomla.  I emailed some and even got no response from some.  What the?????.  Finally we found buyhttp

Everything changed.  Site loaded perfectly.  Never seen a problem.

We paid a little bit of extra money (one time fee) for the transfer and have paid a little bit extra for certain other one time events.  All worth it.

For basic joomla questions, they usually answer them for free in customer support.  A huge plus.

What is so great is that they know joomla, so if I get stuck, they have a system by which i can pay them to install something and make sure it runs.  When I did the math of how much one hour of my time was worth to my own business, I began relying on them as kind of an IT support.  For example, if there is a component that requires 3 hours of my time to noodle with and set up, I can instead pay them to install it and configure it for a small fee that allows me to spend my time on other things.