For my mission critical sites, and those of my clients, I manage an Australian reseller account, which gives me greatest control over the hosting environement.

For my recreational and pro-bono sites, I use Bluehost.

Why choose Bluehost?

I have found Bluehost to be very reliable over the past few years.  Reliablility on the web comes down to how infrequently the host server ‘goes down’ or becomes unavailable.  Many hosts boast 99.9% uptime, but often this is an optimistic figure.

Bluehost satisfies all the basic requirements for the setup I advocate:

• Provides PHP, and MySQL (required for Wordpress)
• Fantastico Wordpress installer (completes a vanilla install of wordpress in about 4 minutes!)
• Unlimited Addon domains (you can host multiple different sites with different domain names for the one cost)
• Unlimited Subdomains (you can create subdomain1.mysite.com.au)

I monitor my sites using free independant monitoring services, so I am comfortable recommending Bluehost as an entry level setup.