Most of these sites feature two things – cPanel and Fantastico – both of which are requirements for ease of use in my book. cPanel is easy to navigate and loaded with features allowing you to easily check stats, set up email, create database, password protect directories, and more. Fantastico offers the fastest and most straight forward installs for more than 20 of our favorite Open Source programs and scripts like WordPress, phpBB, ZenCart, Galleries, and other utilities. For the average website owner or blogger, these features cut down on a lot of tech support/webmaster support time.

In alphabetical order the web hosting companies I recommend are:

1 & 1 Web Hosting is a very well known web hosting option for many bloggers. A lot of associates use it and while they don’t have cPanel they have a reasonable substitute. For a limited time you can get the first 6 months of Business Hosting Package FREE!

Based out of Atlanta, GA, A Small Orange provides both shared hosting and virtual private servers. They advertise no limit hosting, cPanel, multiple stats packages, Fantastico and advanced email options.

GoDaddy is my personal choice for domain name purchasing/registration but I do have clients who love GoDaddy’s web hosting, too. They don’t have Fantastico, but do have their own version of it called Hosting Connection which gives site owners access to a variety of one click script installations. They provide shared hosting, virtual dedicated servers and dedicated server plans.

HostGator is my personal choice for web hosting. They have been doing a great job of hosting 30+ web sites for myself and my clients for the past two years. HostGator is very affordable, offers cPanel and Fantastico, and has had amazing uptime! HostGator has tech support that is second to none! Anytime I have had issues with my sites they have been able to help me identify the problem and resolve it immediately. You can read a review of them here.

HostMonster is another popular choice for affordable web hosting. They allow you to host unlimited domains on one account which is great for owners of multiple web sites. Fantastico and cPanel are included, and you can get $50 of PPC credit for both Yahoo and Google with your account.

HostRocket offers unlimited bandwidth, 1,000+ GB of RAID protected storage space, cPanel and Fantastico, 10 websites per account plus add a new site every month, and $50 Yahoo search credit.

I have been a customer of Jumpline since their first year in business – 1997 to be exact – and currently have about 15 client websites hosted with them (some of them have been hosted there since 1997). Jumpline’s uptime has been close to FLAWLESS, the tech support is knowledgeable and helpful, and they have been very stable. They do offer ValueApps – their own library of scripts – but it is not as intuitive as Fantastico.

Lunarpages.com offers enterprise level redundancy and security in their Tier 4 data centers with a dedicated staff of over 120 support professionals.

Do you have a high-traffic site that needs scalable, high end web hosting solutions? If so, MediaTemple is my first choice! Powerful grid service replaces shared hosting and the dedicated physical virtual servers in their Nitro program run on quad core processors.

Mosso is another service for sites that need instant scalability like a popular blog (that regularly gets Digg front page traffic), a large e-commerce site or 20 medium sites under one account. Mosso uses cloud technology which is basically instant, easy access to large scale computing.

NetworkSolutions.com is probably what I would consider to be the most credible and most likely to be around forever web hosting company there is. I registered my very first domain name with them in 1997 and have never once questioned the quality of their services. They have a more options and plans than most providers – in other words, you will be able to find a solution to fit your needs.

Site5, a great solution for eCommerce, Blogs or Ruby on Rails sites, is co-located with The Planet. Site5 uses extremely high-end servers and doesn’t crowd them. Additionally, they handle their own tech support and offer a 60-day money back guarantee.

I hope this is a helpful resource.   Finding a good web host is not easy, because many hosts offer sub-par support.  I’ve tried my best to list only the best web hosts there are. Or you may find you need to sign up for dedicated hosting services from a trusted provider.