Dreamhost

• Reliability
• Support
• Features
• Price

I’ve never had downtime that wasn’t my fault but for the one time that they moved everything to a new datacentre, and that was just less than an hour.

Their support staff communicates by email and is generally much faster than “at least 24 hours.” They’re friendly, pretty knowledgeable (though sometimes they seem a little confused when you get into specifics), and willing to work with you on things that are wrong, too. Higher priority things get better response times, as well (once, I accidentally broke things badly and received a fix in about half an hour).

Despite being a shared host, you receive shell access via ssh. You can host streaming media, jabber servers, use php, rails, cgi, python, and as long as you don’t do anything really conspicuous, there isn’t even a CPU usage limit (a notorious problem on shared hosting).

Even if you’re hosting a few domains, you’ll be hard-pressed to overstep your bounds. And though some may not appreciate it, everything Dreamhost does is permeated with a certain amount of wit and even a touch of what I think of as “hacker spirit;” that playful quality of being willing to try new and different things (they even have a suggestion credit system that lets users help drive the adoption of features that they’d like to see).

As overselling seems in vogue these days, their price for what you get in terms of storage and bandwidth may not seem that great, but looking beyond that, you end up with something better than unlimited bandwidth and disk usage.