If you're just getting to grips with it, i'd recommend
www.dreamhost.com - probably the cheapest out there, and from experience of dozens of hosts out there, they do actually provide a decent budget service with a huge amount of (text based only) support, and features. Main plus points are hosting of unlimited domains, pop boxes, databases etc, not to mention access to useful tools like ffmpeg (video conversion on the fly, server side - ala youtube).
If you then need a bit more (normally faster response time), looks for a good UK based host, with a decent reseller package at a reasonable rate.