[Catalyst] OT: Recommendations for big-time hosting

[Brian Kirkbride]

Hello all,

I'd be interested in hearing opinions from the Catalyst community on 
the best managed hosting.  We run a Catalyst-based web service and are 
currently on several self-managed dedicated hosts at SoftLayer.  I 
can't praise SoftLayer enough, but in the interest of sanity we'd like 
to move to a fully, Fully, *FULLY* managed setup so that we can focus 
on our App instead of routine sysadmin stuff.

Searching the list archives for "hosting" comes up with a lot of links 
to the best shared or VPS plans under $50/month.  We're talking more 
like $1000+/month for our needs.  At this point, it's all about the 
quality and reliability of service - not price.

So what's you recommendation for absolutely bullet-proof hosting that 
let's you sleep at night?  I'm talking pro-active monitoring, 
upgrades, patches, backups, redundancy setup, architecture planning 
and growth.  Everything you might need.  Staff that understands why 
you'd need Nginx or Lighttpd in front and what FastCGI is.  People 
that can handle tuning Postgres instead of just slapping MySQL with a 
stock config on your box.

Rackspace is immensely popular, but I'm worried that people are just 
comparing them to crap hosts that put cPanel on a white box and call 
that managed.  I trust you guys/gals and your experiences a great deal 
more than a forum like WHT!

Retaining a 3rd-party, 24/7/365 management service is a possibility 
too.  Any recommendations on those?  Matt, do you guys offer that sort 
of setup at Shadowcat?

Thanks in advance,
Brian