It was a bit nostalgic to read back over this thread...
I'm still here! :wave:
Nostalgia indeed!
I've left FWS on one of my "jump links" homepages just to keep it as a reminder in the background.
A lot of time has passed, so it might be good to briefly just update the "last visited" aspects of my results, just to give the hosts involved some credit for still being around, and all four are.
Some observations:
Seraphim, are you still down for new registrations while doing backbone work? That's worth a notice to people in the purpose of this thread. (P.S. For the link to your sales page I got a bit of a fluke "403 forbidden" notice, so check that when you get a min.)
Deeplist, I lost track over the passage of time. Per this study's highlights, do you still host sites by request too, or are you at existing clients only?
The third entry in my winner list has had a couple of branding changes. Folks may recognize brands like "Lifelesspeople" and I think L2P, but they were slowly rebranding over to AgainstSilence.com and that branding looks mostly complete by now.
cWahi had a security breach a couple of years ago, but ... time has passed so I might remove the red tag on them presuming they've done well since. (I'm not up to hard digging to see if they ever had one again.) Meanwhile cWahi's claim to fame was the controversial "Unlimited Downloads*" (Asterisk for "unknown amounts of Unlimited"). This study started as my own caution against overselling that may still be rampant here. It may be amusing to see if the wannabe types are as prevalent or not. But I haven't yet heard of anyone "busting" cWahi, so while the other hosts in the winner circle have "mid level sensible" plans, if you have some big bandwidth material, I'd be interested in an update on someone's experiences there.
For my own use, all my primary info is on Seraphim Labs. One obscure but important little page is on Decker Services, and of course they can see my activity pulling, but neither have they forced me to "log in once X days" which was another problem of my candidate companies. However, no longer having the interest to maintain four mirrors of my test pages, that I *wasn't* pulling from, my accounts from the other two did expire, and that's no penalty. So just the general advice is if you use a webhost, even though you aren't logging in, make an agreement with the host to never kill the account *if reasonable activity is occuring* on page pulls.