I've never had too many problems with 1and1, and any niggles I have had have been sorted very quickly, their support guys are top-notch. That said, I only use them for domain registration these days, not hosting, since their packages are a bit too inflexible and expensive for smaller sites. So now I host with purplecloud who specifically target customers with smaller requirements - decent list of bolt-ons and upgrades. If your site really takes off or if you want to use anything other than PHP/MySQL/perl then it'll outgrow these guys fairly quickly, but as a starter host they're excellent.
