A friend and colleague of mine convinced our small firm to begin using Dreamhost for our website hosting. Before that, we'd been using a local contractor who handles our network administration, so we had a little trepidation about using a company all the way in Los Angeles. But so far, we've been really very happy. We don't mind only using email for most of our support questions, the inside control panel is very user-friendly for newbies, but there's a lot of wiggle room to improve a site and do more powerful things, once you begin learning more about back-end programming. We've had very little down-time so far, and think the blog and monthly newsletter are actually funny, as well as informative.
We were also very happy with the discounted rate we were able to get (my colleague gave us the affliate code "HOUSTONSPACE" - apparently users can refer people and give them around $100 off their service fees, in return for free hosting), so our first year of hosting was incredibly cheap. I think depending on the service, if you use one of those codes, you can get it down to around 20 bucks for the first year.