I am just seeing this forum has been deprecated, so perhaps there is another place to put this comment now.
Anyway, I want to voice my extremely positive feedback about Media Temple, my new hosting provider. And to bash Dreamhost, my old provider, which did not perform well for my needs.
With help of a very qualified technical guy, I worked for several months trying to make DH shared hosting work for my needs. We kept experiencing very slow page loads - like absurdly, unusably slow times even though my sites are small, low traffic, and not complex.
We consulted DH tech support several times. They once acknowledged a problem with a heavy load on my server, made some adjustments, and we got a nice pop for a short time. But within a day or so, performance sagged back down and DH basically was not able (or prepared) to do anything about it again. Not completely sure the technical issues, but some combination of bandwidth loads, server loads, and use of separate servers for hosting mysql.
We tweaked every Drupal performance setting we could. We installed Boost module (which didn't work on DH, as I recall). We trimmed down image sizes, tried to optimize CSS/JS, etc. Nothing worked.