I've read several good reviews on MediaLayer and am in the market for a 10 dollar or less a month host with room to upgrade.
I took a quick look at their website and they don't advertise insane stats for 2 dollars a month, so I assume you actually get what you pay for with them, is that the case?
Essentially, I'm looking for some examples of WHY Medialayer is a top quality host. I'd love to hear some stories and/or references, if anyone here has them.
I have been with Medialayer for the last year, using their application hosting, and so far the experience has been quite good. They helped me transfer my sites over, and have answered pretty much all of my tech support questions within half an hour. However, I'm reaching my limit as far as their application hosting goes, and I'm not sure if I can afford the next jump.
My current deal is around 35 dollars a month for 50 gb transfer and 2500 mb of space. I've been playing with my setup for the last month or two trying to keep it under those limits, but now that I'm looking to launch a new site, I don't think I can do that anymore. They have offered another option for me, which would seem to be a VPS type solution.
Application Intensive (A.I.)
15,360MB SAS RAID Protected Storage
200GB Premium Data Transfer
768MB Dedicated RAM
DirectAdmin Reseller Access (create as many accounts/domains as you wish)
LiteSpeed Web Server (Enterprise)
Use of our Redundant DNS cluster and anonymous nameservers
R1Soft Continuous Data Protection
Full Management, 24x7x365 proactive monitoring
$129.95/mo, free setup. (month-to-month commitment)
Signup URL: https://clients.medialayer.com/signup-ai.php
Add-ons:
[+] 100GB Additional Data Transfer: $25/mo
[+] Additional IP addresses with justification: $1/mo per IP (first additional IP is free with justification)
Each virtual environment is given additional space so that you can safely use all of the 15GB within your reseller account.
Each host machine (the system housing all of the virtual environments) is based on the following hardware:
Dell PowerEdge 2900
Dual Quad Core Xeon 5420 (total of 8 cores at 2.5GHz each!)
16GB FB-DIMM RAM
8x 73GB SAS 2.5'' Drives
PERC 6i RAID 10
1000mbps uplink
Located in New York, NY.
However, 130 bucks a month is a pretty big jump up from what I have now, and is quite a lot when compared to most of the VPS solutions being offered here. I'm also slightly concerned about the NY server location. My current sites are based in China, and have had some long load times using their LA servers, and I'm concerned that that would just be exacerbated by having a NY server locale.
So, should I be looking to stay with them or move on? If I move on, are there other good hosts one could recommend that would be able to provide similar levels of support?
Also since im making this new thread I will write a review so far on what ive experienced with medialayer.
1. My account was setup within 1 hour of purchase
2. I received a professional and very detailed email regarding all the services
I had access to, which I might add was very user friendly.
3. The DirectAdmin Layout is very clean looking and modified to fit their websites
theme. Everything works perfect.
4. And 4th the most important of all.. I did a dns check on my domain after 2 days of letting the NS propogate and checked intodns.com and several other dns places and their dns is setup perfect.. there is literally no error at all which is very rare. ussually intodns.com will show an error on most dns's. My site is noteably extremely more responsive then it was on my prior host and they even allow ssh access so I was easily able to transfer my large sql db file over in a few seconds.
Overall this host is very good from what ive experienced in 2 days. Now I realize its only been 2 days but from what ive experienced on the process of setting everthing up and the site running, for 2 days I can tell its an excellent host of choice. Their email support is also extremely fast. Ive had a question regarding my mx records for mail and was responded within 2hrs or less with a very detailed explaination of the question I asked.
Please guide me which web host to be choose. I am planning to host a jewelry online store with 500 products. I am looking for shared hosting in starting. Web space required would be around 100 Mb.
How much bandwidth you think in starting it will be required?
Which web host is better and why? Also tell me considering features wise too. If any other good web host for starting then tell me.
I am in the process of building a database-driven website. The main purpose of the site is really for me to improve my PHP and MySQL, but I will be writing a forum and offer blogs to users, as well as the main point of the site, which is to allow users to upload text-based artwork (ie. stories, poems, etc). I don't expect the site to use up that much bandwidth (assuming my code is clean) or space, as I don't expect it to grow that large. Like I said, it's mainly a learning exercise.
Anyway, the point is, I am looking for a host. I am currently with DreamHost but am having a lot of trouble creating a custom php.ini (because I know absolutely no PERL and am just starting to learn shell commands). The main host I'm considering is MediaLayer. They advertise on their website that you have a private cgi-bin directory, but it was unclear whether this directory would have a private php.ini. This is pretty important for me as I don't have the skills (yet) to do anything too clever like what is required at DreamHost to change it.
Is anyone here a current or former MediaLayer customer? Is the php.ini in the cgi-bin? I know that DownTownHost have private cgi-bins, but the php-ini is not there.
I had a look on the forums but, although I found mostly good general feedback about MediaLayer, I couldn't find anything that specifically addressed the creation of a custom php.ini file.
i have a question about overselling, if i offer 999999gb's of diskspace for $1/mo, you say i am overselling, and its a bad thing, right? well does that mean medialayer oversells because they can't truly offer unlimited mysql databases, can they? eventually, just creating databases thousands of times will consume diskspace?
View 14 Replies View RelatedI am torn between Cartika and MediaLayer. I am looking to have 2 sites hosted with them. I am at the moment only considering these two options. I am looking for reliability, speed, and true multihosting along with CDP back ups. The third contender was UnitedHosting, but they are a smidge more expensive. I will be hosting one Joomla site and one Wordpress site. Price wise they are on par. Both their reps seem outstanding. I need a nudge one way or the other.
View 14 Replies View RelatedI work for a medium sized non-profit organization. We are currently looking to upgrading our hosting. These are our requirements:
- 2 gigs of storage
- 15-20 gigs of bandwidth
- PHP/MySQL
- SSH access
- As fast and reliable as possible
Our budget is up to $30/month, but I'd like to pay a little less if possible. Most importantly, we need the hosting to be fast and reliable. Our website is built with PHP/MySQL, and right now it takes forever to load anything. It seems that Medialayer and Liquidweb keep coming up as reliable and fast hosts, so I'd like to hear your thoughts as to which you think would fit our organization best.
I moved from A Small Orange to Medialayer in late June of 2008, and although I was a little unsure on going from cPanel to DirectAdmin, aside from one small thing* I honestly don't miss cPanel at all. Medialayer themselves ported my sites over (I'm always scared I'll mess things up on my own) so really, changing control panels was rather painless for me.
Anyway, as far as actual hosting I could not be happier. The only downtime I've experienced was scheduled and announced well in advance and never for very long.
Support tickets and general inquires are answered ridiculously fast to the point of being scary. I'm still not used to getting replies within minutes instead of hours or days.
I don't currently use a custom plan but the fact that I can request one is a huge plus to me. With my previous host you could add extra bandwidth but not space (you're only option was to simply go up to the next plan) and that always felt very limiting to me.
I'm aware that these days hosts with Medialayer's pricing structure are called "expensive" by some, but I'm still stuck in 2004 and consider them priced just right for what they offer. Also, as far as I'm aware Paypal is still the only payment option, and although that is fine for me, it won't be for others.
* (The only thing I miss is the ability to purge/make unwrittable the stats/awstats folders. I'm not sure if this is a host vs host or cPanel vs DirectAdmin difference, and really it is so minor in the grand scheme of things and only even noticeable to someone stupidly anal such as me.
i wanted to share my hosting review with medialayer.com
i have been with medialayer since 10 months.
my site visitors are mostly from istanbul,Turkey and europe ,even there is a long distance i get efficient response times.
support times are excellent,although there is a time zone difference,i get instant help during my working hours.
i recommend every one who needs a reliable and fast hosting.
in case you need to check my site with medialayer here is the link.
it has been a while since I last visited WHT. So hello all! Work is slow today and I'm procrastinating.
I was with MediaLayer for a good amount of time. I used the service mostly to host a personal site and develop some APIs using Truveo video search engine and Zend platform on Facebook. The source codes of these projects were synchronized and managed by a group of developers through SVN+SSH tunneling.
I have absolutely nothing negative to discuss about MediaLayer. They have been great every step of the way. Granted, they're not exactly the cheapest option among what were presented to me at the time, but I'm glad I picked them. After all, $10 didn't break the bank, and I simply didn't need 500GB of bandwidth (are they in the scales of TB these days?). The servers were well managed, and multiple DNS servers are always a plus (well at least save me a trip to DynDNS). They used LiteSpeed, which is an excellent choice, also considering their web server environment is very much similar to my developmental machine at home. Oh yeah, they don't use Cpanel. =) Haha.. I've never liked Cpanel. Too clutter.
I didn't observe any downtime while I was with them. None of the developers involved in the projects had issues with the SVN server. I don't have any statistics to prove it, so you just have to take my words for it. =) MySQL access is reasonably fast.
Customer service was great. All emails were answered professionally within 24 hours, including weekends. Phone representatives ware extremely helpful when I called. I remember once when my identity was stolen, the CSR I spoke to on the phone were very reasonable and handled the billing issues to my satisfaction.
So I'd highly recommend to MediaLayer!
I'll keep it short and sweet. I signed up for medialayer on December 23, 2007. Its been more than 6 months and there has been not one unscheduled downtime, the support is phenomenal on the rare occasion I need to use it and its the fastest host I've ever used, dedicated or shared. My sites have been on the front page of Digg, Osnews, Stumbleupon and I've yet to see my hosting so much as shudder. Unbelievably powerful servers. They are accommodating, friendly and brilliant.
No, they don't have terabytes of bandwidth and it doesn't cost $1 per month; but it doesn't get much better than this otherwise.
Hosted sites ticketed to mod team. Keep up the great work, Medialayer.
Currently I am hosting with MediaLayer and I am very happy with their service. I have been with them for over a year now. Their uptime and speed is amazing. Support is fast, knowledgeable and all round pleasant to work with. I have no problems with them except for one. Their packages are pricey for what you get ($10/month for 500MB Storage, 10GB Transfer, 3 domains ). It is coming time for me to upgrade my package but I do not want to pay the fortune they are asking for a paltry amount of extra resources.
So my question is, what other hosting companies are there out there who can offer me the same excellent services that MediaLayer does but with more resource bang for my buck?
Been using ML for 2-3 days now.
vBulletin's performance is a hell of a lot better compared to my last host (fasthosts.co.uk - which takes 60 seconds to give an error page!)
In addition, litespeed is pretty damn sweet.
Setup took maybe 10-25 minutes from payment.
Only problem I have with it is that SSH is a bit too locked down - wget/etc don't work, and sort of negate the need for me to use SSH in the first place.. (to get and unzip files without having to upload massive things)
I have a fairly important php bug tracking system on medialayer.
The service has never been down in 6 months and the speed is excellent.
I imagine customer support is just as good, but thankfully i've never needed to try
It's much faster, more flexible (no hard written resource limits) and more reliable than most hosts i've used (site5, hostingzoom, resellerzoom to name a few).
I couldn't ask for a better service.
After weeks of research on WHT i am still undecided who to choose for my next webhost.
I have narrowed it down to three:
- MediaLayer - 1gb/20gb/6 domains at $19.95
- LiquidWeb - 1.5gb/100gb/3 dmoains at $19.95
- MediaTemple - 100gb/1TB/100 domains at $20
Which one would you recommend and why ?
Also does MediaTemple grid service offer any advanctages over the other two.
My requirement is that i want my website to run very fast and server to have very good uptime. I am currently on HostGator & using over 10gb of monthly transfer. I am getting oround 5000 hits but hope to increase it around 10,000 with a new wordpress blog. They reason to move from HostGator is that any MySQL/PHP based apps run extremely slow.
I signed up with MediaLayer [url](ML) for my client in November last year.
I've read a lot about ML here which are mostly (all?) good +ve reviews & so I decided to pick them to host my client's site.
Since the website is an ecommerce site based on Magento, I needed something that could handle application load. Its for this reason I chose ML.
Magento itself is pretty slow the first time until cache starts working.
So far its been smooth at ML and this post is just to add to the pool of its +ve reviews on WHT.
There was just one unexpected downtime which lasted for a few minutes. It was the mysql server that was down, not the http server (litespeed).
You dont get a whole lot of space at ML, so hosting a lot of raw data like images can be pricey - most of the space taken on my client's site are product images - and duplicated in cache for every dimension by Magento. As of now it gets 500-1000 pageviews a day but this is to increase over 10 times this year and if it goes beyond shared hosting limits (which I doubt), we'll move it to ML's VPS.
I am so overwhelmed by the quality of hosting provided by Medialayer, that I decided to review them after being almost 2 years on their servers. My "bread and butter" website is hosted on their server and all I experienced in these 2 years was sheer quality, stability and prompt customer support (very rarely required).
It is a saying that you get what you pay for, and it shows. Medialayer is not one of those hosts with "unlimited everything" plans for $3 a month. I am on their starter shared plan which is $9.95 a month with 500 mb of space and 10Gb bandwidth. Some may find that costly, but believe me, it is worth every cent.
Uptime: Excellent. I have never seen my website down or someone complaining about it. No downtime experienced whatsoever till now.
Speed: Rocket fast. Scripts execute rocket fast too.
Ease of use: Excellent. They provide direct admin (instead of cpanel) and never faced any problem with that either.
Customer support: Blink of an eye, round the clock. I am from the opposite part of the world (GMT +5.5) and at 11 AM my time, I get instant response to a support ticket if opened. Secondly, they go above and beyond, - I had a problem with one of my php scripts and these guys studied the script and pointed out the flaw (which might have been harmful) if not rectified.
I will be more than happy to let anyone know my website, mods please let me know how do I prove the authenticity of the review, with my website. These guys deserve a lot more than just a review.
Conclusion: The best host so far I have got. In these aspect I must tell you, I have 3 more hosting service providers, Medialayer smokes them apart. And my personal thanks to Gurpreet Virdi via this forum for running such a tight ship consistently. I believe, the success of a website business depends on the hosting heavily, so Medialayer folks - it has been my pleasure to stay with you all these time and thank you for everything.
After I moved from (spit) mediatemple to MediaLayer last April, I wrote a glowing one-month review [url]. So 10 months on, what is it like?
Well, rather boringly, I don't have much to add to my original review, since it's still as awesome as it was then. I tend to forget most of the time that I'm even paying for a hosting service, because it's just there, rock-solid, serving my sites stupidly fast.
At least it's more exciting at other hosts when you're constantly having to manage one crisis after another. It's true that MediaLayer are more expensive than many other hosts, but they're a bargain at the price.
MediaLayer's public Hyperspin report [url] is currently showing better than four-nines uptime on all servers. 'Nuff said. Great company. Happy customer. That's all.
I've been hosting with medialayer for a while now, and to date have had quite few problems with their hosting/uptime/etc.
I host my main website's support site with them, and have recently run into a few issues... issues which I'm not sure how to resolve.
The thing is, the helpdesk developer was recently looking into our setup, and found there are some issues. He has requested that the open_basedir be modified to a particular value for our vhost (which to my knowledge, is not a security threat, etc.).
Medialayer says they can't make the change, because of how directadmin works, it won't be permanent. At the same time, the developer says it is possible to do this and make it a permanent change through this
file /usr/local/directadmin/data/templates/virtual_host.conf ...
Now I am unsure as how to resolve the issue because I need this change made, but am not sure it is possible, or who is wrong and who is right. I'm not trying to point fingers, but I would really like to know what the best thing to do in this situation is.
I just wanted to post a quick review... I until recently had all my sites on HostGator... a fine host but not a performance host. I did my research and ended up trying MediaLayer! All I can say is WOW... I've been developing a Drupal based site for some time now and it was sluggish on HostGator to say the least. After the move to MediaLayer it screams! I wasnât expecting this extreme of a performance difference but it really did improve... And not just a little... If anyone is looking for speed... Do yourself a favor a give MediaLayer a shot... It's that good
View 12 Replies View RelatedFor APPROXIMATELY the same price range downtown host offers 5 GB Disk Space and 100 GB Bandwidth and unlimited domains, while medialayer offers only 500 MB space, 10GB Bandwidth and only 3 domains.
Question: Is downtownhost OVERSELLING(maybe it is doable) or is Medialayer providing much less VALUE for MONEY.
Last year I moved from Site5 to MediaTemple's GridServer. MT seemed cool at first, but over the last 6 months it has been absolutely horrible, with almost daily periods of downtime, atrocious php/MySQL performance, http lag, appalling support ticket response time (measured in days and then only a copy-paste of a FAQ without answering the actual question, necessitating more days' wait), etc etc. At least they have plenty of customers on their forums addicted to the Kool-Aid, saying "Well whaddya expect for $20 a month? It's better than Dreamhost!"
I trialled a few hosts recommended around here through one-month accounts etc, and they were all good. Eventually I went with MediaLayer and moved my two main sites there five weeks ago. Both are WordPress installs (one Super-Cached; one not) averaging between 200-500 unique visitors a day, with the occasional traffic surge to several thousand from Digg or other big linkers. A few hundred megabytes of files between them. Historically, bandwidth for each has been anywhere from 10Gb to 30Gb a month. My impressions so far:
Performance: amazing. Page execution times between 0.1 and 0.2s on a WordPress page making 20 queries. I am hosted on their Chicago server, and from my home in Europe it literally feels no slower than a local LAMP install. I had an influx of 7,000 uniques in one day on one site with no problem at all. FTP responsiveness is also better than MediaTemple's. Two weeks ago I installed a punBB forum on one site: also stupidly quick.
Support: amazing. Queries are answered extremely quickly (in minutes; I think the very longest was just over an hour), and in a highly cordial, professional and helpful manner, whether it be by layer0 himself or any of the other support staff.
Uptime: very good. A couple of hiccups so far measured in minutes. Enquiries about these were, again, very rapidly and informatively dealt with by support. They also have a public hyperspin report for all servers, which is very impressive.
Value: excellent. I don't make any money directly from my websites, but they are showcases for my professional work. I just want them to be available and pleasant to use (ie snappy), and they are. I signed up on the $20 a month plan and then thought maybe I could trade off some unneeded storage allocation vs increased bandwidth (since I also serve a few media files). They wrote me a custom plan at the same price in minutes, with which I am very happy.
Backend: I find DirectAdmin pleasant and efficient for my needs. I actually prefer it (or just about anything) to CPanel, which I find horribly clunky. The inbuilt stat package is poor, though I understand they are planning to replace it, but it doesn't matter to me since I use Mint and Google Analytics anyway.
Conclusion: at last, a host that is focused on performance and customer satisfaction.
If they carry on with this level of service, I will have no hesitation in moving to a higher plan at MediaLayer if my needs grow rather than looking for another host.
[PM'd moderator with domain info]
I haven't got time to spend forever comparing hosts, so i had a quick look around and saw good things said about imountain and medialayer.
I bought a wordpress blog which is currently doing 75k uniques per month (probably not much in the scheme of things). I am aim to buy or build several more blogs of this size plus a couple of ecommerce stores.
I think as per 1 good review i saw of imountain, that either host would probably do, but can anyone offer some advice of if speed is significantly different between either of them or if there is any other reason i might be swayed either way?
it's been year and half since we are together, so i can tell a lot more about medialayer.
1. speed is excellent. various users from all over the world reporting that the website reaction is good to excellent. that includes aussies.
2. uptime is perfect. i know, that sometimes they DO announce some maintenance works, and i suspect they really do them, but till now my impression is that they operate like little dwarves - nobody sees and nobody feels anything.
3. support - quick, effective, polite - who would want more?
me and my firm are very happy with our choice we maid a year and a half ago. these days we launch another website, hosted with medialayer.
I've reviewed MediaLayer before but I have to do it again. I just paid my latest invoice and thought to myself "If I didn't have to pay this monthly invoice, I would forget I even did business with MediaLayer" I can't remember the last time I had any sort of hosting issues with my site. It's always online and always fast!
View 14 Replies View RelatedI shifted my website universalteacher.com from yahoo to Medialayer in July 2008 because yahoo has a very bad customer support. You can read my review about yahoo here:
[url]
The support provided by medialayer is excellent. Whenever I contact them, they reply within 1 hour. Mostly I have got reply within 15 minutes. The executives are knowledgeable and very helpful.
I am located in India and Medialayer is in US. I always contact them in odd hours. Please see the following query that I asked when I was testing wordpress MU on one of my sites at 6:13 AM and i got the reply at 6:26 AM. The second query i asked at 12:40 PM and got reply at 12:48 PM ....
I has one blog which hosted on Bluehost for 2 years now. My blog is base on drupal, the content is less than 100M, and has 1K unique visitors per month, use around 300M data transfer per month. My problem with bluehost is quite "normal": site went down without reason, sql database disappeared sometimes, site banned for exceed cpu usage limit, ...... So it's time to move on.
I would like to build one more site in the new year along with my blog. Since the new site will be mostly hosting flash games, I expect far more bandwidth requirement than my personal blog. And my budget is under $10 per month.
So far I narrow down my choices to following six:
1. Nearlyfreespeech.net
100M Storage $1 per month, 1G Transfer $1 per month
2. Vectorlevel.com
1G Storage, 10G Transfer / $5 per month, Extra Data Transfer: $1/GB per month
3. TotalChoice.com
2.4G Storage, 80G Transfer / $5 per month, Extra Data Transfer: $2.5/GB per month
4. doreo.com/
2G Storage, 60G Transfer / $6.99 per month
5. Medialayer
500M Storage, 10G Transfer / $9.95 per month
6. Servage.net
510G Storage, 5010G Transfer / $6.45 per month
Medialayer seems has pretty high reputation here in WHT, but it's a little expensive to me for only 10G data transfer.
Vectorlevel is young and very Medialayer alike. 10G/$5 month data transfer seems right for me. But as it's a new company without proved track record, I'm not sure whether they will still be good in years. ( But I really like their "Do what you want" attitude.)
TotalChoice.com and doreo.com both offer more than 50G Transfer per month which is good if my site become popular in the future. And both two seems don't have complains here which is also a good sign. But last time I checked, one site hosted on doreo is hosting with other 308 sites on one server, and a totalchoice one is with 203 other domains.
Though both are acceptable ( comparing to my site on Bluehost server with other 908 domains, or STEADFAST.NET one with 2048 other sites), but still seems a little too much. And doreo's $6.99 plan only allow 1 MySQL db which is also limited to me.
Nearlyfreespeech.net is a cost-efficient option for my current requirement, but will not scale well if site become popular in a long term.
Servage, yes, there're tons of complains about how servage sucks, but since two sites:
freebreakgames.com and Mooktown.com are both hosted on Servage, one hosted with 46 other sites one with 19 other sites, and both two sites are stable, so I add this one as backup option.
Am trying to choose a shared host. Either RackSpace Cloud Sites ($100 a month) or MediaTemple ($20 a month) or MediaLayer ($19 a month).
I was really inclined to MediaTemple but I read some real bad review about it. Am wondering what has your experience been with any of the above. In Cloud Sites, do the 10000 CPU cycles get over quickly?
I'm in a quandary over which host to choose. I've narrowed my choices between the above three. While this can be a subjective decision, I am looking for insight, any opinions and also advice on what to watch out for in deciding the best host for my needs.
Speaking of my needs, its fairly simple I have one site that runs my blog (on movabletype), another site that holds images and such, and a couple of others that I use for hobby/development purposes. All are generally low bandwidth.
I used dreamhost past and got burned by their latency and downtime. So while my needs are meager compared to many others I don't want to sacrifice performance/uptime in the name of saving a dollar.
They all offer money back guarantees so that gives me a chance to play with them but I'd like some advice on what to look out for, advice or other member's experience with them
Littleoak hosting, a small newish hosting company with nearly a rabid following over on the realmacsoftware.com's forums. This is a support forums for rapidweaver which I also use. I cannot install movabletype on this host - tried for 2 days with the help of their support. Finally gave up. If I go with them, I need to convert to wordpress. I do not want to do that just so I can use a new host. They have two packages that could work for me one at 25 dollars a year and another at 80 dollars. Bandwidth and storage are the differences.
Medialayer customer support seems very good, I can run movabletype. Pricing seems a tad high especially given my needs but they offer lots of flexibility and up to 6 domains for one package at 20/mth or 3 domains for 10/mth
ICDSoft top notch support, has a great webmail client (I hate squirrelmail) Little inflexible but nothing that would be a show stopper. I was able to install movabletype, I have yet to fully try it out though. A single domain per account at 6/mth If I have multiple domains it could get pricey.
I'm not sure if it matters but I ping all three sites and medialayer came out on top with 6ms, icdsoft with 13ms and littleoaks with 30ms.
Any thoughts opinions and/or advice regarding these three hosts. I've done enough research and while there may be other fine hosting companies these three are on my short list.
I thought some might find this short review useful. I recently found my website - vladstudio.com - pushing shared hosting limits fast (powweb.com at that time). After long days of (unsuccessful) searching for ideal hosting (fast, with lots of traffic, managed, and of course cheap :-) ), I got good idea from my wife and splitted my website into 2 pieces hosted separately.
For domain, PHP and MySQL, I've been using MediaLayer Application (shared) hosting. I might already mention it here before - I'm extremely happy with them, once my site hit digg.com frontpage and I got 500000 visitors in a day, and hosting did not go down! Right now, it serves about 25000 visits (500000 hits) a day, every hit being dynamic PHP page with several MySQL queries.
For hosting images and downloadable files, I use PacificRack dedicated server (most basic one, but with 2000 Gb/m traffic included). I am very bad at managing servers, but default configuration and my modest knowledge of Linux was enough - it is only used to store files that visitors download from vladstudio.com.
So, if your site is growing out of shared hosting too, consider 2 separate hosting accounts for application and files - it works very well for me. And once again, big thanks to MediaLayer and PacificRack.