Currently I’m using PowWeb but it’s a bit pricey at $100ish, and though they’ve improved in features, their customer service has gone down hill.
Can anyone recommend a good host with the usual bangs and whistles, but decent customer service (no autopay option would be nice), and a bit less expensive? Included domain registration would be great too.
Anyone? 
What specific “bells and whistles” do you need? How many domains are you hosting? How much traffic do they get? How much storage do you need? How technical are you? $100/mo is insanely high for personal/small business hosting, so I’m assuming you must have some unique requirements. Tell us more so we can guide you to the right solution.
That’s $100/year. It’s just a personal site. I’d like to install a blog with ad support at the very least. And be able to have multiple mail/FTP accounts under the same domain.
My last one had various ‘wizards’ to make it easier to install common things like blogs, wikis, bbs, storefronts, mailing lists, etc. I didn’t use many of them but it was nice to know they were there.
You’re not going to get much better service for much less than that.
Dreamhost, my usual choice of host for their great service and balanced offerings, currently has a first-year promotion for $9.23 (for the entire first year), and then it goes back up to $8 a month or so.
On the other hand, if your personal site uses very little bandwidth and storage space, you could consider usage-based-billing hosts like NearlyFreeSpeech.net. Barebones hosting with no wizards, but it does have all the usual things: multiple accounts, shell access, etc. They have this handy pricing estimator if you want to see how much you might save. Note that for all but the simplest personal sites, NFS.net will often end up more expensive than $100/year.
I’ll second the suggestion for Dreamhost. I’ve been with them for years with no complaints.
$100/year is not particularly pricey, especially with a domain included. To some extent you do get what you pay for. It costs money to run this stuff, and having people to do support costs even more. The cheaper the service, likely the more users they’re going to cram on one machine (meaning worse performance and reliability), and also most likely the fewer support people they’ll have per customer.
That said, I know people who use Dreamhost and like it, if you’re looking for another option. It sounds like it’ll cost you roughly the same.
Dreamhost sounds about right. I’ll give it a go. Thanks!