Most of the ‘huge’ providers are focused on the bottom line / increasing profits more than anything. The publicly traded ones are more worried about making their shareholders happy than their end-users. The private ones are generally motivated by profit over quality.
The factors that I personally believe make a good provider good – would be the overall reliability of the services offered [not just uptime overall, but consistency, etc], the speed of the support provided and the quality. It doesn’t do you any good to get a response after 5 minutes if the response makes no sense or doesn’t address your concerns in the slightest for example.
Honestly I think the best bet is medium sized providers. Not the one-man-shows and not the providers with hundreds of thousands of clients – but the ones in the middle with thousands or tens of thousands of customers.
What I can or cannot say about specific providers [naming names] is limited here on WHT due to the rules – which I’ve mentioned before.