The canonical place to find hosting recommendations is http://www.webhostingtalk.com .

If you're looking for information about where YC-funded startups are hosted, here's the latest numbers from wikipedia's list of non-acquired, non-defunct YC companies:

   4     SoftLayer Technologies Inc.
   3     Layered Technologies, Inc.
   3     ThePlanet.com Internet Services, Inc.
   2     NoZone, Inc.
   2     Rackspace.com, Ltd.
   1     Amazon.com, Inc.
   1     BitPusher, LLC
   1     Carnegie Mellon University
   1     Columbus Network Access Point, Inc.
   1     Global Netoptex, Inc
   1     ServePath, LLC
   1     Simpli Hosting, Inc

What kind of a stack are you running? What are your memory/CPU requirements? How much bandwidth will you need? Are you serving video or just text/images?

Anyway... it all depends on what your req's are...

Hi nickb,

Thanks for your response. I was going to get into details, but figured my requirements are so typical it wouldn't be worth the extra description.

This is for a standard LAMP-based app with a minimum of graphics. I expect traffic volume to be low for the near future and have no heavy-duty requirements for video and such.

Basically I'd like to find an economical service that can scale with my user base.

http://linode.com/

Excellent. I was looking for something like that. Thank you!

http://vr.org/

I use them. They've been good so far.

Heard about this at a meet-up in SF; http://www.sun.com/emrkt/startupessentials/hosting.jsp

I don't know if your referring to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=64795 as the older post, but it is only a month old. The web hosting industry is pretty cyclical, but within a month, the data should still be relevant.

foodawg,

Thanks--that looks better than the thread from 148 days ago I had bookmarked (whatever date that happens to be):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29011

Is there a search function here I'm missing? I did search for search to parse prior posts but withdrew without the words of the most.

Rackspace's offerings start at $400 a month. And they have no prices on their site, so you have to talk to a 'sales associate'... God I hate it when you can't get a price off a website. Can't believe I wasted two minutes on that. Learn from my error.