I have hosted a couple of sites over the past several years (beaverheadriver.com and undisclosed-location.com) with westhost. I chose them because they had a fast connection, were in the western US, had good uptime, full featured accounts and were value priced.
Westhost was not the cheapest host I reviewed. I stayed away from the "cheapest" after reading others' tales of woe with cheap hosts. I tried to look at hosts that were charging enough to be viable, provide support and remain in business next year. WestHost has added a new forum that provides improved support by staff and other users. It is comforting to find on the forum that many WestHost users are also refuges from bad hosting that have stayed.
I like that the accounts are full featured, in that even the basic account has cgi-bin, email forwarding etc, multiple mySQL databases. This allows a person to start small and grow to a bigger account as needed. Lots of other hosts force you into more expensive accounts to have access to all the goodies like a cgi-bin and multiple mysql databases.
Downside: Really haven't had any major problems. My support questions have been how to do things rather than why isn't this working. Only thing I really don't care for is the setup fees to point multiple domain names as a single site. Domain name alias pointers are $10 setup each. I guess this is better than monthly fee I see other places but not as good as the included pointers other providers offer. It is something to be aware of and compare when reviewing hosts. I would rather pay a one time setup rather than being dinged every month.

Recommended: Yes

Monthly fees (US$): $7.95/month billed annuall 100MB disk, 5Gig Transfer
Platform used: Linux
Hosted on Secure Server: No
Database used: MySQL
Main focus of Web site: Publishing/Content