Web hosting recommendations?

I'm looking to get a VPS (or other web hosting service--enlighten me if I should be getting something else) for a few personal projects of mine. Any suggestions for good companies to look at?

My requirements:

- root access to the server (I want to be able to install whatever I want)

- good out-of-box performance--I once worked on a 1&1 VPS that segfaulted every few hours; got rid of it before figuring out why

- disk space, bandwidth, hardware, cpu speed aren't so important.