Google is not your friend when it comes to searching for a hosting provider. If you search on google, 99 out of 100 recommendations will be for EIG owned companies, such as HostGator, BlueHost, Arvixe and what not. -They are a giant in the hosting industry but when it comes to quality hosting, they are a horror story. If you are happy with any of their services, such as another member mentioning their emails were delayed but still they were happy, then you might not have experienced quality hosting.
Even though you have already chosen, keep this in mind should you decide to leave. Avoid the mammoth companies like GoDaddy, EIG, and so on. Everything is the bottom line to them and they are so well known they really do not need to worry about support since they know a new sucker is born every minute. They can 'afford' to lose customers because the pie is so large. Find a small company with a good reputation. They cannot afford to lose customers, so most of the time they will go the extra mile for you. They know it is cheaper to keep a customer as opposed to the cost of gaining new customers. Most of the time you will pay more, but as we all know, cost is not the only consideration. Low price, Good quality, Good service Pick any TWO, you cannot have all three! You may even have a local company that you can host through. I have toll free phone account with a local company and they have a local office 3 miles from me. They host websites, but due to a lot of factors I have chosen to go elsewhere For the last several weeks I have been looking at hosting companies. Why? GoDaddy will not or cannot put SSL on my site at a reasonable cost. Bought their SSL package, installed it, then COULD NOT ACCESS MY OWN SITE! Two days later I canceled the SSL and started looking elsewhere. One hour ago I agreed to buy hosting from A2 Hosting in Michigan. So far, billing, support, and so on has been great. Even got a personal email from the CEO and have emailed back and forth several times. Try that on GoDaddy, EIG, or any other mammoth company in any industry. Do not have everything set up yet, but anticipate no problems. Best part is that SSL through them will work for me and it is included in the hosting plan.
Apart from what has already been mentioned, seems to me, EIGs have a different plan altogether. They earn from stocks, acquisitions and by making the user paying twice. Usually an user ends up with EIG after searching on google and finding a recommendation by an affiliate or a paid marketer. When the user finds out the hosting lacks the quality they need, they search on google and in most cases, ends up with another EIG brand. So, the user is paying twice for the same period of time and the EIG is getting paid twice by the same user.
There is no "best". Some of those mentioned above were overseers that used to or still offer "unlimited space" and "unlimited bandwidth" with their Shared Hosting services. A good web hosting company is the one that makes reasonable promises to its customers, delivers quality, reliable service and most importantly provides proper technical support!
I agree with this. Each web hosting request and web hosting offer are unique. And only once they can match.
Well, whatever the hosting choices, make sure you keep an offsite backup of your website. Should price hike or any hosting issues, you can easily switch over to another vendor.
Godaddy is the worst, I agree. However, in your case, I think the issue is in your PHP script. Their database connectivity is good enough. I've had a website with them for years, and never had any database issues. The database has grown large over the years, still working fine. Get your script checked for indexes and for limits in query first.