i don't normally do this kind of thing, but i'm going to wax enthusiastic about my hosting provider, cornerhost , which touts itself as hosting with a human touch . this is no mere marketing euphemism - devoid of any spirit - for it doesn't take long for a new cornerhost customer to see the immovable force behind the company, michal wallace , performing his characteristic brand of understated, yet unparalled, customer support.

a case in point. recently, a peculiar and difficult to track down behavior began to appear in ids , the image management script that i use to power my photo gallery . i spent a little bit of time trying to track down the cause of the problem but didn't have time to really dig into the root cause, so i decided to lob a barely coherent email to the private email discussion group for cornerhost customers.

24 hours later, michal had not only tracked down the bug, but had proposed several alternative solutions and actually modified my script to get it running correctly again! i want you to pause for a moment and think of what would happen in you asked your hosting provider for help with a script that they didn't officially support.

michal obviously has a deep understanding of how to run what would typically be viewed as a commodity business. now, i can hear all you freshly minted mbas screaming that "high touch" customer support isn't scaleable and you're right, to a certain extent, it's not. but it has been my experience that cornerhost cultivates a relationship with its customers that discourages abusing the system and the support takes place in a semi-public forum where any number of smart people can jump in if michal is to busy to respond within 24 hours. and, of course, he's probably not unaware that after one of these superhuman feats of support, a percentage of his customers with a little google juice are probably going to be more than happy to step up to the plate and give him a good-old-fashioned unqualified endorsement.

so, if you're in the market for affordable hosting with a human touch, look no further than cornerhost .