I agree about their page. It almost looks like you don't want to trust them because they have too much crap cluttering up the page.

The original reason I went with them, was simply because they supported payflowpro from verisign (now paypal) for credit card processing. We had a payflowpro account and needed to move hosts, so we needed to find out that supported this COM based API.

They really know their stuff with MS technologies and are one of the first hosts out there I see putting out new stuff when its available. They have offered free hosting for IIS6 and IIS7 when they were in beta to get your feet wet in production environments prior to their release.

There is a small amount of nickel and diming I would say compared to some other hosts, but I suppose you do get what you pay for

Like if you want SQL Server, its 10 bucks a month. If you want SSL, its 10 bucks a month (plus you buy the cert). However its 90 bucks for the 1st year of hosting, and 120 subsequent years, which is not a lot to pay for great hosting and email for an entire year.

However you do get more control over your stuff, which is really key.

Lots of hosts don't allow connections to the SQL Server from outside of "localhost". Godaddy is known for this. discountasp allows me to connect directly to the SQL Server from anywhere, so I can have winforms apps that interact with my web database with ease.

I can tell you the control panel for your site looks nothing like their front page, and is pretty intuitive and even has a freakin API if you want to write front ends to do stuff to your hosting account programmatically.

My only dealings with netfirms have been with customers who have hosting there and then want me to revamp their sites. I always try to move the host somewhere else, just to get more control over what is going on. Also as you said, the 2 times I contacted netfirms support, I wanted to hang myself.