Question for any website owners

I’m seriously looking into changing either my hosting provider, or my weblogging software, or both. I need some advice.

I chose Fasthosts because they seemed to be the best value – a full gigabyte of storage, generous bandwidth, etc. I later upgraded, and got Linux hosting rather than Windows which kept interfering with my old Blosxom blog. (Remember, the one with the complicated URL.)

Now, I’m not sure what’s happened but it’s stopped posting properly. The posts appear on the blog, but pings are usually not sent, which effectively prevents me from sending TB pings (although I can still use Haloscan to do that, but it’s not as convenient). In between actually posting the entry and sending the pings, it produces a “500 Internal Server Error” and the posting process stops.

Now, Fasthosts has a 10-second time limit on CGI scripts in order to stop people taking up valuable system time. If this prevents a well-known weblogging system from working properly, perhaps I should just switch providers if they are not willing to change. Can anyone tell me if this limit is normal (you should be able to find this on your hosting provider’s website.)

Does anyone know of a good hosting company in the UK, which provides a gigabyte or better of storage and a good bandwidth allowance? Preferably one which allows MySQL databases as you need this for most good blogging software (except MT).