I was with Hostgator some time ago for one of my bundles. About 3 years ago I switched to Site 5 for all my accounts. Currently I host 8 different sites on a single account have 7.5 TB bandwidth - its an oversell - but basically unlimited unless you are doing some large things and then you can get a server. Takes only a few minutes and few clicks to go from domain purchase to an operating site as well with them Never had a problem with downtime/load time and they respond to emails in less than 20 minutes usually. I think all their Servers are at THe Planet. If you want to see - Take a look here. http://www.answercult.com/site5.htm
We guarantee 99.9% uptime. It's very rare one of our servers doesn't hit this. A few years ago uptime was good but still not anywhere to where it's at now. We've learned a lot over the years. We just recently finished upgrading every shared server in the fleet to new hardware. geomark we've never had email down for 3 days on any of our servers. What was your ticket number?
Aside from Google actually stating that this doesn't make a difference, that is a stupid thing to say altogether; there are thousands of sites on a shared IP that rank well and have no issues at all.
I've been with Hostgator over a year, with several sites currently, and I've NEVER personally seen my sites down. They may have been, but as much as I've been on them I've never had a problem. Now to figure out how to switch all my sites over to one Baby account...