Well said KPR…24/7 support is definelty a good option…but many of the good shared hosts still only have extended support hours and not 24/7 for customer support.
Just make sure you get a host with support….even if it is a one man shop!! 
Actually, we had a REALLY good one-man shop that we used locally for a couple of years in the early days and his service was excellent. I guess you never know.
Aussie Bob is a good guy..I’m sure his reviews are good too..I forgot he launched that review site earlier this year. I used his httpme reseller service for a while when he owned it…and one of the hosts we currently use is Bluewho which is also a take off of that service. Speaking of being put on a bad server…we were on a Bluewho CPanel server that was TERRIBLE for some time. There was one guy who was running some scripts everyday at noon…and the whole server would basically crash everyday at noon for 20-40 minutes. This went on for around 2 months until they caught they guy. This is the issue with shared hosting or reseller hosting for that matter. Bluewho is still a decent company though…just got put on a bad box.