There are plenty of cheap hosting providers out there, however wich one of them is the most reliable that supose to be a question. As of 6/03/2004 these are what we like...
If you need to host a simple site, for demonstration purposes only then the best hosting from our experience is the new commer to the market, it is
http://www.1and1.com it offers plenty of packages and overall 99% uptime, they also own their own back bone. They charge $50 per year and they have the cheapest domain name registration of $5.99. They also offer cheap microsoft hosting. We host 15 web sites with them for about half a year now, management is great and we love them.
If you need to host an ecommerce web site with a shopping cart such as MIVA I would advice you to go with
http://www.speedfox.com From our experience they are the most reliable as of 06/03/2004 . However, please do not pay 2 years in front because today they are most reliable tomorrow they might go belly up. Stick to month to month basis. It is $10 per month I believe. Their up time is pretty good.
If you need to host a PHP with MYSQL web site then there could not be a better solution than
http://www.ipowerweb.com We host multiple client's web sites with them for years now and so far for us they are the best. $100 per year including domain name.
We had experience with more than 14 hosting companies in the last 4 years and the above are the winners so far.
Hope this would help