Anecdotes are one of the only real ways to get information on whether or not a hosting provider is any good. At least it cuts through the marketing BS. I generally track hosting company's Twitter accounts too - it's pretty telling what people will say to them. I've been using a few sites to keep on top of it as I bring up some new services:

[1] http://reviewsignal.com (reviews scraped from social media / public support requests) [2] http://serverbear.com/ (VPS/Cloud host benchmarks & stats)