Hello!
I have been using Heliohost for several months now.....I agree, it has been awesome.....I taught myself PHP and MySQL and created a pretty awesome site for an internet radio show. Hopefully my site will be getting more hits as the host of the show announced my site on air today.
I have all the same issues you mentioned. Some days are good.....some days are very bad. Some times the website is down, sometimes it is up. Other times the website us up and running properly, but I can't access cpanel at all. Other times everything is working great, but I cannot access the MySQL database to update information.
I hate to state the obvious, but you get what you pay for. My hope is that the issues get better, and they seem to be getting better more often lately. But if my site gets popular and the downtimes become an issue, I will go out and get a pay webhost service. Either way, I will not make bad comments about Heliohost. I have learned alot from this service. They have all the top software and are nice enough to let me use it for free.
I am not stating all this to say "stop complaining," I am just sharing my experience with the site over the past several months. I have been looking for the same types of threads you are looking for, but never really seen any. It is nice to see I am not the only one with the issues!
Mark
www.impedimentsofwar.heliohost.org