SpeakingX

In order to avoid making the same mistake, I started some serious research on virtual private server (VPS), also called virtual dedicated server (VDS). This time I focused on Drupal.org and spent some time on webhostingtalk.com as well.
This link is my starting point (http://drupal.org/node/110531#comment-284480). I sent short email inquiries to a list of companies with my main concerns:
- if the plan is fully managed (some providers clearly mention this, some are don't)
- if there are any basic support for drupal (of course not at the code level)
Below are what I've got.
-www.zone.net: no reply
-www.knownhost.com: do not provide support for 3rd party applications
- http://www.DrupalValueHosting.com: fast response, however it's not VPS and I cannot run my own program
- www.jaguarpc.com: no response
-www.liquidweb.com: fast response, "Drupal can be installed on a vps/dedicated but we do not support the drupal software
itself. If you require any changes to the server we will assist you as best we can."
-www.slicehost.com: replied with "Slices are unmanaged and we do not support any end user applications"

-solarvps: they don't know much about drupal? see this wht post

-fugurehosting.biz: I had online chat with them and I specifically asked them if they are hosting any drupal sites with memory 256mb, and the answer is yes. They also help moving sites if it has cPanel.
-hostv: quite warm response "we do support Drupal related server errors (but coding support is out of our support since its developed by 3'rd party)."
- hostican: "management of VPS is almost covered, however we do not provide any
support for third party scripts or software, like Drupal, Joomla etc."
- rimuhosting: very fast response. "We can provide support for installation and configuration of drupal but would not promise a code-level support. However if the support would take more than 15mins then a sysadmin fee would apply for $10/15mins."
-crucial paradigm: "We can help move Drupal, and configure the server so Drupal will work optimally for you."

Many of these providers have good promotions on webhostingtalk.com. Among them, Jaguarpc seems to have the best deal. They also mentioned free site transfer which I assume including drupal. Unfortunately I have to pass since they didn't even reply my email.
Liquidweb and WiredTree appears to have good reputation on webhostingtalk. Their website and managed plan description look impressive. Liquidweb's response is fast and followup is professional.
Rimuhosting is friendly to drupal, and is recommended by a respected drupal developer. However their plans seem to be at the low end, especially bandwidth and disk space.
Finally crucial paradigm, who has an ad on drupal.org, responded me with quite encouraging answers. The plan is fully managed and it seems they know drupal well. Similar to rimuhosting, they use Xen technology while everyone else use Virtuozzo or OpenVZ. One thing concerns me is I couldn't find any reviews or comments on crucial paradigm on either drupal.org or webhostingtalk.

Most of these providers offer fully managed plans, but the scope of the "management" varies significantly. You'd better read their description carefully or better yet ask them directly. I hope to write another post on this issue later.
I finally chose Crucial paradigm because its
- fast response
- fully managed plan
- drupal awareness
- offers CentOS 5 which mirrors my local server
- Xen is a better technology???
Now being with Crucial for about a week, I am glad to say my decision was right. I have mixed feelings towards them. Below I list some of the positive experiences I had.
- fast response: submitted tickets usually are responded with half an hours and problems are usually solved in several hours. They work during nights and weekends. It's truly 24/7.  I am very impressed.
- drupal site transfer and setup: they transferred my drupal site from the existing VPS provider and set it up for me. Any problems encountered were solved. I was able to run the site without doing anything myself
- special requests: they answered all my requests, such as bringing all the drupal related components up todate, installing 3rd party programs like ffmpeg
- server related issues: all the questions related to servers are answered.
- drupal related support: I think many good managed plans probably (and should) cover the stuff I described above. However,
crucial also provide some drupal related support, which I feel is quite impressive. There are two examples I want to mention:

• I use a php function tempnam in my code which didn't return correct result on the VPS server. So I popped them a question. They quickly email me back telling me that that function returns absolute path since php version xxx. As a non-php programmer, I certainly wouldn't know this without some digging.
• new users have trouble with my site's registration. They actually registered my site to test it. When I mentioned my user has a yahoo email address, they test it again with a yahoo email account. Wow, this level of support indeed exceeds my expectation.

Maybe I am being naive here, maybe other providers are providing the same level of support. But without using some concrete examples, it's really hard to define the scope of a fully managed plan. If you have good examples, I welcome your comments so that it doesn't make me look laughable here. Furthermore if everyone shares his experience we'd have more (good) options when selecting the best provider to suit individual's need.

 Of course no one is perfect. I have increasingly more concerns with Crucial paradigm. 

- one server down time in a week

- disk space is low: 10 GB for my plan ( I paid $39/month with promotion) and I've already used 50% (I'd be more than happy to see this if this is due to my site. Sadly it's not.)!  With the same price,  I don't think it's hard to find a managed plan with more disk space.

-24/7 monitoring may be not up to par? My server was down and memory usage was high, and both of these incidences were identified and reported by myself. I wonder if there are any good managed plans that are indeed providing proactive monitoring.

- high memory usage ( I almost use up my memory quota (256 Mb) with such a low traffic site, and was told 200 Mb is needed for proper service functioning. I would like to know others' experiences here.)

Update (2/12/08): After I reported the memory problem, they  changed something which is supposely to bring memory usage down. The result is: my site completely went down in the last two days. When you visit http://ispeakx.com, it shows the ugly "out of memory"message. With gate.com, I actually got 512 mb memory although I signed up for 256mb (don't know why) and the memory usage is very very low. Is this because crucial's managed plan pre-loads a bunch of software? After sending me so many seemingly promising emails, they still cannot fix this problem! It turned out no other drupal sites are using the same plan (256mb) I have. I start to question their experience and competence.

Update (2/13/08): after more than two days my poor website is finally alive again. The solution is downgrading apache from 2 to 1.3 and php from 5 to 4. Even after this when I run "top" I see memory is uage is about 230mb out of 260mb. Is this really normal for a almost zero-traffice new website. I actually used patch from this link to measure my drupal site memory usage: http://2bits.com/articles/measuring-memory-consumption-by-drupal-bootstrap-and-modules.html
It turns out that total memory consumption is around 17mb. Not sure if this is correct, I'll post the full result in another post.

Overall if you ask me whether I'd recommend Crucial paradigm for your drupal hosting, I probably would say yes and no as you can see from the above. Please be aware that there's no money back guarantee policy from Cruical paradigm. Anyway, let's see how things go in the next several months. I'll keep you posted. 

Update:
I am no longer using Crucial paradigm.