My Advice: I've been with 10's of big companys wanting to suck your money. But now I'm with arvixe.com, they provide good service and a good price. Haven't had my site down for anything other than 1hour for a RAM upgrade.
How much bandwidth and web space is "extra"? What do you consider a cheap price? There are tons of companies that will sell you a lot of space. You might not be able to use all of it, but it looks good. If you want stability, go with one of the big boys.
The day you need support, you'll cry tears of happiness if you're hosted at hostgator. Otherwise, for approx. the same price, hostgator and the rest are equivalent, they do the job, period. Note : shared hosting, if you go for it, has disadvantages. If you need cpanel, SSH and SFTP, cronjobs editing and the like, not all hosts will allow it on shared hosting (hostgator does, I don't know many other that allow it). If you're ready to pay for a VPS, then you're usually restricted by disk restrictions. Dreamhost VPSes don't have disk size restrictions, but their VPS plans do not come with frigging cpanel and not even mysql databases or phpmyadmin (you'd have to pay for a shared hosting account next to the VPS, ridiculous, fortunately they don't block external connexions, you can use another hosting plan with another host to take care of your DB).
Same thing happened with me! I found most of the big web hosting service providers are useless, they demand a lot but do not provide satisfactory services! Many company's support team do not provide any desired support when required. I'm very happy with hostome.com; they do not demand much but really provides professional and quality service!
careful with Softlayer, they opposed the violation of the DMCA, as long as your site is in the whitelist, you can sleep well
All reputable companies "opposed the violation of the DMCA". It's not something that is acceptable, and not something reputable, real, registered companies are willing to deal with.
PublicMango.com - complete solution for website consists of domain registration + web hosting + web design