I've gone with the 'cheap guys' before and really regretted it (eg. Bluehost) and have had servers with the 'big guys' (eg. Rackspace Cloud, Liquid Web VPS and Dedicated)... but, the best support, service and performance I have gotten is from Revive Hosting (htt://revivemarketing.org). From what I gathered they got sick of bad hosts for their clients and setup a hosting system for them..now they offer it to others.. great deal... best support.
The other thing to do is visit website host review websites, but beware as most of them are paid placement/ad spaces,.. or search google for user reviews for web hosts.. etc. If you see any TOP 10 listings with the cheapest hosts around,.. they probably paid to get there.
Hope that helps and best of luck to you.