Like this isn't a topic done a bazillion times on the web, but hey, local personal experience matters.

POST YOUR WEB HOSTING EXPERIENCES and RECOMMENDATIONS HERE PLEASE!

I'm constantly looking for great hosting, and have yet to be really satisfied.
Bedno.com/ChicagoFunNews.com is a fairly big site (like >60k pages), using a custom LCARS CMS w/ PHP+MySQL.  I can't remember a down day in years on powweb at <$20/mo.  Similarly, several Drupal sites have been chugging stably for years on GoDaddy and names4ever.
BUT - I believe those are all relatively low load, even at thousands of views/day, having simple queries and little outgoing mail.
IN CONTRAST - MassUp.us exceeds the average cheap hosting limits on queries, cpu and emails. Personally (preaching to the choir I assume), I think a few dozen kiloqueries and a few hundred emails an hour's not that big. But dreamhost has given us several days of outage this year alone.

So finding great hosting for THAT (even if it costs something) is my top ongoing priority, but the issue is important in general.

Feedback demanded!