I've spent a little time this week hunting down a well priced Drupal-friendly hosting environment for a client of mine.  Actually, for years I've been extolling the virtues of shared/virtual hosts like Dreamhost who have been bumping up disk space and bandwidth allowances before gmail wet its bed for the first time - but then I signed up @ Rackspace and have fallen in love with how muc quicker Drupal runs when its file structure is on the same machine as its database - especially when that machine solely exists to power your own sites.