Thanks for the Kudos…
As Kevin said..people often pay for more than what they need.
Sounds like your requirements are pretty basic (right now).
I would test out a couple of the control panels and see which one you prefer to use. This is really an individual thing. The majority of the shared hosts use Cpanel and if you prefer that particular control panel going with someone like Bluehost may be ideal for you. You can host up to 6 domains with them and their support is very good. Lunarpages is also a good CPanel host.
As mentioned, there are a number of good quality niche hosting players and it really depends on your specific needs. However, unless you have a real HEAVY traffic website such as a busy forum such as CAP…most of the bandwidth and server space provided by the top shared hosts would be fine for you.
If you are comfortable with hosting in general you may consider reseller hosting plans such as HostGator which allow you to manage multiple domains in one control panel. Having multiple “Cblocks” or domains on various web hosts is important if you want to cross-promote your various domains. If they are all at the same host i.e. Cblock, then the search engines could possibly interpret that those domains are related and discount your links.
Hope this helps….