Ok, I read the nightmare horror story about Hostgator, which reminds me of Hostmerit, whom I left last year for not honoring the extra fee I paid for addon-domains. I looked at Dreamhost's page, but they want you to pay 5 or 10 yrs in advance to get any kind of good rate, or charge you $50/setup if you want to go monthly. So Hostgator and Dreamhost are out.
Right now I'm on Servage, and mostly they're fine; they serve my needs for my various adult sites without any problems, but Drupal is so db intensive, their db servers are just not up to it -- I click something, and even with a normally very fast ADSL connection, I sit there and wait almost a minute sometimes for anything at all to happen, and that never happens with regular HTML sites. What I really need is a good host for my Drupal site, with fast db servers, to which I might later add other domains without a lot of drama/trauma/expense.
Oh, and I went and checked out drupal value hosting in response to that 75% discount advertised here, but unlike the $20/mo mentioned here for their "super duper monster servers", I found that the price is actually $40/mo, so 75% off still leaves you paying $10/mo, and for a site which doesn't yet have any income, that's too much; plus I get a bad feeling when one price is advertised here and I go there and find it's actually double.
DDEV is the official local development tool of Drupal. And like Drupal, DDEV depends on the support of the open source community.
