Web hosting roll call

So my current provider sent me a bill for the next 2 years. They bumped me up to busine$$ cla$$ service. That got my blood to boil -- so now I'm on the hunt for a new hosting provider.

I did the googles on grm and I see bluehost and 1&1 recommended. Anybody else out there have a recommendation? I'd rather ask here because anytime I try to find reviews on the googles/internet y0, well, every internet provider sucks -- even bluehost and 1&1. In fact -- they both suck really bad!!

I'm looking for someone that will host the websites for me and the missus, mail, etc. One nice to have that not everyone seems to offer is backups. Bluehost offers them, but they have a cheap version and a 'spensive one. 1&1 has the previous 5 days backed up and you can self serve whatever files you need. That costs more @ bluehost.

Help/thoughts freely sought!

I'm not entirely happy with Dreamhost (they're very friendly and have funny status updates while they're having email outages...) Really not too bad, but I can't offer a recommendation.

My girlfriend isn't entirely happy with Arvixe, though I think they're a step up from Dreamhost functionally.

Guess I'm just offering a couple of names you don't have to research if you have other recommendations

Dont know much about the subject, but I have heard good things about these guys:

www.hostgator.com

I'm a happy long-term Bluehost customer here, so I won't say more.

I use surpasshosting.com with a $50/yr plan. Apparently I'm grandfathered in because I don't see it there anymore. They're been fine for me - no complaints - great support.

I've been using myhosting.com for the last couple years ans have liked it. They do the basic hosting, 10 1gb exchange mailboxes (no Outlook or activesync at the entry tier, but imap, pop, and owa all work great), and on the web hosting side they have a nice site design tool plus a "one-click" automated setup/install for most of the common web apps (Wordpress, drupal, gallery, coppermine, etc).

Inmotionhosting.com, I've worked with 2 websites hosted on them, good service and no problems so far.

All my stuff is on http://www.angryhosting.com/ run by a friend of mine. Basic hosting is a buck a month. They do daily backups, and service is exemplary.

Thanks for the suggestions -- keep em coming if you like -- already made a few contacts based on some of the notes here......some services that I would have never found had it not been for this forum.....

A lot of it depends on what you need. For my purposes I really liked Webfaction, although I eventually outgrew them and went with a cloud server.

Has anyone used google's site hosting services and pointed their domain to it?