I've been using Media Temple, and they suck.
Please help me. This must be useful information for others here, too.
Some drawbacks are that there's no FastCGI, so no Django or Rails, and you can't get your own IP address, even for money, so no TLS. Also, it's Apache 1.3, if you care. If you just need to run some Wordpresses, they do a bang-up job or running mod_php 5.
S3 is cheaper than NFSN, so if you have lots of big files, you can host www.example.com on NFSN and point media.example.com to S3.
(Grain of salt: I haven't used EC2.)
- cheap: $7.77/month
- reliable: i've never seen them go down
- advanced developer features: cron, .htaccess, php.ini editing
- really clean user interface (forget using godaddy)
- amazing customer support: call them. they answer first ring. there's no waiting for hours after trying to navigate crappy phone tree systems.
i've used a dozen different shared web hosts over the years and the vast majority of them suck. Powweb really stands apart from the crowd, especially when it comes to advanced features and customer support. When I was doing web design consulting I moved every single one of my clients over to Powweb -- they're that much better.
I'm using MT's Grid and have had good luck, but you have to be on Grid Cluster 1- it seems like Cluster 2 is down every week.
Someone actually recommended http://asmallorange.com to me recently, but I have no experience with them.
www.asmallorange.com
Their prices are reasonable, too, and the shell access is great, but the speed isn't blazing, although very acceptable. You should be fine if you're not too graphics intensive.