Hosting support

I just want to post a word of caution about Drupal Value Hosting. I know there have been quite a few posts on the forums about this company, many of which I have read. Those issues aside, they have changed ownership and have been purchased by another company or have merged, so I feel that this will be useful to anyone considering them as an option.

Earlier this year, I moved a client's Drupal site to one of their servers. We chose them because they offered support for Drupal and CiviCRM (specifically allowed sending lots of e-mails with CiviMail). Everything went great. The server was fast, and although support requests were handled slowly, with a little pushing they configured the server to properly send messages through CiviMail via SMTP.

Then, two days ago, the site went down, with a DNS error and a disclaimer saying the server had moved. After contacting support, I received a reply from a new company at a different domain without any apology or explanation for moving us to a new server and IP address. Bizarre that a company would move servers and change your "static" IP without informing someone beforehand. But life goes on, no big deal. It was still fast and everything seemed to work once we updated DNS records.

Hi,
When i put my Drupal site on line via FTP, who's gonna manage my database?
My master (of disaster) :) told me that i'd better manage my database my own, i mean tables, fields etc etc,
this is a loss of time isn't it? But my question is, following tutorials about Drupal on line via FTP it looks like you
don't have to create any table in your database but just create the database and users, this is cool
but a little bit scaring to a rookie like me.
i'm asking my self at night: who's gonna manage it? Is it gonna be safe and well working or a mess??

I'm looking to launch a new video sharing and purchase website. Looking for a web host with a virtual dedicated server to start with.

The video size and bandwidth will be considerable in a few months - thinking of video size to be limited to around 500MB for each video and only after purchasing people will be able to watch it.

Any suggestions about the best hosting providers are most appreciated. Any recommendations about the video size limit will be helpful too.

Thanks

Help!!!! Go easy on me guys I am relatively new to all of this. I had my Drupal build in a subfolder on bluehost. I was able to successfully move it to the main folder so that when I type my domain in it does directly to the the site, but now whenever I try an login I get a 404 error. What did I do wrong and how can I fix it? Thanks in advance.

I have a big file I am trying to upload via ftp and it is giving me the chmod failed option when trying to upload it into "/sites/defaults/files/" directory. I can't change those permissions either. I am wondering how I can change those via ssh - and upload a huge file perhaps via ssh. Will gladly pay you via paypal for an hours worth of your time.

Are there any hosting providers that currently host US Government Drupal Sites? If so, what is the name of the hosting provider and for which agency? Thanks.