I have a lot of experience with Bluehost and 1and1 over last 12+ years with a lot of clients, as well as some experience with Media Temple and here are my comments.
Bluehost
Prior to 2010, Bluehost was a decent webhosting company. They had decent performance, decent rates and good service. Then they were acquired by a big dog company Endurance International Group which owns a ton of other webhosting companies (google it) and it's been downhill ever since.
I've watched their features change for the worse, their quality of service go down, hold times on the phone increase, control panel overhaul to a clunky stupid icon based layout that absolutely is garbage, and they've also had some major attacks over the years. I still recall waking up one morning to 10+ phone calls from clients stating all their websites were down. Took Bluehost 3 (!) ****** days to get the shit back to normal one time. Also had clients URLs and emails blacklisted for being on shared hosting with some other nefarious customers. Also had major problems with their email hosting which comes with their packages. At this point, I've moved more than 20 clients away from Bluehost to other hosting over the years. I will never use Bluehost again.
1and1
I like 1and1 because they are cheap and they have decent uptime. I've had my own domains and websites with them for more than 8 years now and they are ok for my needs. They also allow domain privacy without charging for it. That is awesome, as some other hosts charge for that sort of thing, and it can get expensive if you own a lot of domains. They also don't charge for moving a domain, which again, some other hosts do and that sucks.
That being said, they don't have the best service and bury the damn service phone number in their website now. It takes about 5 clicks to get to from the contact page. Put it in your phone for future use. I've rarely needed to call them about anything but when I do, they seem to know what they're doing and usually resolve the issue for me. It's true what some others have said. Cancelling your account may not be as easy as clicking on a link in your control panel. But I believe this is a safety feature. I've cancelled accounts with them before and there was no upsell on the phone. They simply stated they were sorry to see my cancel that part of my account and then did what I asked of them. It was pretty simple.
One negative is over the last year or two, they started doing shady business tactics by adding on some 'added service' to accounts where the fee kicks in after a trial period. You have to manually go into your account and cancel those extension services. Easy enough but I was surprised when I noticed an extra charge on my bill. One of my clients didn't notice it until after 9 months of bills for this extra service which is some bs they call 'extended php support'.
See here.
I am still with them though as for me, the positives outweight the negatives. And believe me, every webhost company has positives and negatives to consider.
Media Temple
Had clients here as well and dealt with them. They are very professional, but bit more expensive per month. They have a really nice custom designed control panel and features. It's way different than any other host I've seen. I think their service is excellent. That being said, they are a smaller company so probably a much smaller support team.
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Additionally, I would say not to trust those 'top 10 webhosting companies' website reviews. Most of those seem like complete BS and they do nothing but compare pricing and features. There is no real experience and who knows who actually owns those sites? Sure would benefit a webhosting company to put those sites out with their own company at the top after a 'thorough' review, wouldn't it?
