They are one of the largest hosts in Europe (~50k dedicated servers if I remember correctly). Large doesn't always mean best, though. Similar to OVH, they provide good hardware, reliability and a decent enough network, but if anything goes wrong you best know how to fix it yourself. I also believe their network isn't /as/ good as somewhere like Rackspace however with CDN's etc. that's probably not as much of an issue.
TL;DR; Yes they're trustworthy, generally speaking
OVH definitely does not provide good hardware; we have more broken disks and NICs there than all our other hosters combined.
Edit: I see we might be exceptions. We have been using OVH since 2005, running up to 40 servers about 2 years ago. We are also running at iWeb, Softlayer, Amazon and Leaseweb. Hardware wise the only one we have issues with is OVH, and i'm talking every 2 weeks since 2005 (in 2006 they managed to lose all our data on 2 clustered RAID machines; one died, all corrupted, then when we were busy setting up the replacement, the other one died...). But they are so cheap and easy (like the easy OS installation which is cloud-like, already for many years) we stick with them for some projects which need high spec hardware in clusters. Note: the SSD drives are great, no problems with those so far (knock on wood).
Really? I guess you're experience differs from mine. Currently we have 5 servers with OVH (Ranging from high to low end) and have never had a single hardware issue. We've had 4 of these servers for +18 months and 1 for +2 years with no issues at all. That being said, they're not exactly known for their fast response times to support calls although I believe they have a 2hr SLA for critical hardware failures. I guess it's just down to experiences though, I have all our high-profile servers/apps with UK2 or LiquidWeb.
Somebody always has a bad experience with any given company. What I keep wondering about is how to effectively get the collective knowledge out there to figure out whether you're the exception or the rule.
I sort of wish hosting companies would publish the hardware failure rates -as seen by them- too - though I don't know how much of a competitive advantage that would be, if any.
Well yes, but this is not getting some bad support a few times; this is consistently bad hardware on our part.
I'm kind of wondering now if we are running different workloads; we are running very high IO and network stuff. Maybe we just hammer a lot harder on the disk than others are? With HP DL360s @ leaseweb we are running the same loads without any problem (since 2006...); 1 broken disk that ended up not actually being broken.
They have no issues with connectivity, they might have higher latency and lower bandwidth than some of the higher end providers. But since +90% of the data transfer on most sites is static assets, using a CDN to distribute those will reduce the bandwidth requirements on the server.
Of course, if you're working on a larger project with enough budget, services like Akamai provide methods of routing your static content via their network, further reducing the problem.
TL;DR; Yes they're trustworthy, generally speaking