I switched to A Small Orange years ago when EIG started swallowing up the world. ASO is fantastic and now I use them with all my clients and startups too.
Side note: an EIG company has given me free hosting for years because their botched takeover of my previous favorite caused them to stop billing me.
I've also had really poor experiences with Dreamhost.
I had some clients on a Small Orange. They used to be great.
EIG took over a Small Orange in 2010, but thankfully left them autonomous for while. Unfortunately in 2014 Douglas Hannah (ASO founder) left and since then things have gone downhill.
This happened around the same time EIG took over HostGator. HostGator founder Brent Oxley and (no coincidence) friend Douglas Hannah have gone on to start a new venture with their big time profits from selling out to EIG.
2014 and 2015 were riddled with major outages at both A Small Orange and HostGator.
I'm sure you remember the 4-day Small Orange VPS outage of Christmas 2015 ?! That was fun.
I got my last client off them after that and never looked back. Just now I looked at their status page and looks like they never really recovered:
https://status.asmallorange.com/
Side note: an EIG company has given me free hosting for years because their botched takeover of my previous favorite caused them to stop billing me.
I've also had really poor experiences with Dreamhost.