Decaflon

Yep I'm in the UK and I use two hosts in the US. One east coast (Hostek) and one west coast (Dreamhost).

Why? Because they're so much better value that UK hosting.

One day I plan to get a dedicated server and I fear the same will apply. I'll probably go with ServerBeach unless I can find something equally decent locally -- which I doubt I will. Optimistic, aren't I?!

US hosting is a hell of a lot cheaper than UK hosting.

If you compare the prices of http://www.1and1.co.uk with http://www.1and1.com you will see that in the US you get more bandwidth and disk space for less money.

FWIW I am another Dreamhost user who is English

Being in Australia, I'd be nuts to actually host anything here. Bandwidth seems to be at least 100 times more expensive in this part of the world and all the hosting deals show it. I've seen dedicated server deals costing a couple of hundred dollars... with just 25gig of bandwidth per month provided? No thanks.

Aelon is hosted in the US.

I also use US hosting and only have one client on UK hosting. Sad but true when said UK hosting is more money for less. Whilst I would love a good hosting solution that was effecient on band width and pocket in the UK, it doesn't really exist like in the US or other parts.

I have one server in the US and one in the UK.

I also am in the UK and recently switched to a US web host (DreamHost). This was mainly because my previous provider (1&1) didn't do Ruby on Rails, and also because of the 69DOLLARHOSTING deal which got me smiling.

I haven't been a user for a long time, so I can't say much for the user experience.

I don't but my Dad uses one in Venezuela of all places.

I don't recall the name offhand but they use a US based 24/7 live support room so there's no "translation" errors.

My site is hosted by Bluehost in Utah. I'm in England.

I live in Canada but host in the US simply because I have yet to find an inexpensive Canadian host that doesn't suck.

I have a .ca domain, but the server is actually in US (DreamHost). Although since my friend holds the administrative rights over the account (we do forums, and other projects besides my blog), I also have another, once again US, server with Textdrive (now Joyent) for personal play-space.

Thanks for everyone's replies!

Has anyone encountered any kind of perceivable delay in serving pages due to the 'transatlantic hop' that your site traffic has to do?

Measurable, sure... Perceivable, not so sure.

My Florida server is shared hosting and it's pretty damned nippy, but there's obviously higher latency, just not enough to notice.

I am also one of the Canadians who hosts his site in the US--cheaper, easier, with the features I need.

I live in Finland and I'm hosting my personal stuff with Dreamhost in the US. It does lag, database queries can hang. I'm considering Mediatemple, but I think it's also known to lag a bit from way across here.

I'm yet another UK user with Dreamhost as my hosts, 2 other devs at my company are too.

Sure you'd get quicker responses from a UK server but I get more US readers than I do UK. Plus money matters and the US just does hosting so much cheaper.

I don't think the speed difference between US and UK is that massive and since there are more people in the US it makes sense to have my servers there. Unless you have a site that is solely visited by UK users I don't think it would be worth going for the more expensive solution.

I just signed up with Mosso.com today, I'm very impressed with it so far!

I was just looking on their (Mosso's) matrix comparison and it doesn't look like they provide SSH access... That's a bit of a bummer on something that is quite expensive.

I like crontab and running other things from my dreamhost shell... it's really handy.

@Oli: Yep, at the moment there is no SSH access, but it is something they are planning on adding. Knowing that you're a .net guy they will soon be making the .net 2 [or whatever it's called! ;)] available.

It is a lot of cash in comparison to the likes of the deals from hosts like Dreamhost or even MediaTemple's GridServer I guess. But the tech support is fantastic, they use LivePerson to give direct chat access with Tech support and it saves a lot of time when you have a few questions.
Mosso offers a high-end package with RackSpace's 100% uptime network SLA but for a lot less money than getting a dedicated Server with RackSpace would cost.

It's been a good choice for me and will now replace a problematic WebFusion VPS that I've had to put up with for the last few months.

They're still on .net v1.1? Eeek. I've been using v2 on my hosting for a year.

I'm sure there are lots of complications with their hosting which makes roling things out like SSH really difficult and that's maybe another reason why people should be careful when choosing a gris-based system like theirs of (mt)'s because the more complex it is, the more places there are for it to fall apart.

Combining Linux and windows sounds neat from a "I want to host it all" point of view, but at the same time, that could equate to people finding a security hole in one of the two and exploiting both.

I just wish I could afford it to try it out.

I'm in Germany, but I host everything with Network Redux in the States. For me, it's not only the cost factor, but the language of course, since I'm not German. One of my clients is here in Germany, and the bulk of their traffic comes from in country, and we've not had any trouble with delays at all.

Before we switched to Network Redux, we did have a bit of trouble, because the host we were using would have all the cron jobs and backups running at midnight or in the early morning hours, which was during business hours over here. Everything would slow to a crawl. That was one of the reasons we switched to first Mosso (which we ran from after about two days; just didn't like the system at all, and they didn't do SSL then, which was a complete no go), and then to Network Redux, which doesn't have the cron job/backup/slowed to a crawl problem, perhaps because they're just better at the whole hosting thing.

Network Redux is wonderful. The best thing about the company is the way they keep the clients in the loop if there are any problems or outages. In the rare instance that something happens on a server, they will always tell us how and why, and what they are doing to prevent a repeat.

I'm in China,I hosted all my sites in China previously,but now I swiched some of them to the States,some with DreamHost,others with BlueHost.In my view hostings in the States are always cheaper than other countries,and their services are fine.

Don't you ever have issues with things being blocked though?

yeah,all my sites on BlueHost were blocked,I can't even login BH's cPanel,What is worst, their support guy refused to get my sites to anonther box,they said I had to buy an unique IP with extra $20 per year.

In the UK, host in the United States, it's the internet, makes no difference I reckon. (we're with MediaTemple)