Hi All,
I thought you might be interested in getting the perspective of this from another webhoster.

As many of you know, I am one of the original founders of PowerDNN and am still involved in the day-to-day operations of PowerDNN.  Over the past year, I've gotten much more involved in the hosting world and have learned quite a bit about the industry works.  What I've found most interesting is how "experts" view the hosting industry and, unfortunately, it isn't always pretty.  For the benefit of everyone in the community, if you are on a hosting provider that is doing one of the things below, you should seriously consider changing providers as soon as possible.

1)  If your hosting company is doing a control-panel migration, get out while you still can!
Hosting companies run on control panel software and, while there are more than a dozen well-known control panel vendors, they all do things differently and have different feature sets.  With many control panel vendors, it is hard enough to upgrade from one version of their software to another, let alone, a completely different system.  I firmly believe that it is impossible to successfully do a control panel migration.

2)  If you're on a discount hosting provider, beware!
I was out at a hosting convention a few months ago and I had the opportunity to talk with a number of webhosting CEOs and CTOs.  During one of the sessions, one of the questions that came up was "What do you do when a customer's website is down?" and alarmingly, a large number of companies said that they don't care if a customer's website goes down.  Why didn't the care?  Because their customers were paying $5-$10/mo and they were paying their employees $20+/hr.  If a customer's website went down, it truly wasn't worth their time to get their customers' websites back up - especially if the customer had paid for a year in advance (which many hosting companies require - btw - PowerDNN has monthly plans because we want our customers to be able to keep us on our toes).

3)  If your hosting company has been sold to a private equity fund or investment group, watch out!
These groups are extremely ruthless (especially in the hosting industry) and don't care about end-users at all - everything and everyone is either a financial asset or liability.  They make their money by buying a company, slashing its staff, making the financial records "prettier", and then selling it off to someone else.  A few months ago at a conference, I met an individual whose company specializes in hosting company acquisitions and he was bragging about the fact that they lost 10% of their customers since they were able to lay off half of their acquired company's employees.  Unfortunately I haven't kept in contact with this person, but I'm quite curious to know who (if anyone) is answering their customers' support tickets.  I don't think there is any way you can lay off half of a company's staff and it have a positive impact on customers.

Even though we are a hosting provider, and we do participate in the global hosting community, I really dislike how "transaction oriented" the major players in the hosting industry have become.  When you are selecting a hosting provider, make sure you are selecting one that aligns with your needs.  There are plenty of hosting companies out there where customers are "just a transaction" and that is perfectly ok, but be aware that next time you're choosing a hosting provider, you are also choosing whether you want to be just a transaction or a real person.