What are good LAMP choices for freelance web hosting?

I think it's best if I ask this question with an example scenario.

Let's say your mom-and-pop local hardware store has never had a website, and they want you, a freelance developer, to build them a website. You have all the skills to run a LAMP setup and admin a system, so the difficult question you ask yourself is – where will I host it? You aren't going to host it out of the machine in your apartment.

Let's say you want to be able to customize your own system, install the version of PHP you want, and manage your own database. Perhaps the best kind of hosting is to get a virtual machine so you can customize the system as you see fit. But this essentially a "set it and forget it" site you make, bill by the hour for, and then are done. In other words, the hosting should not be an issue.

Given these hosting requirements:

• Unlimited growth potential needing good amounts of bandwidth to handle visitors
• Wide range of system and programming options allowing it to be portable
• Relatively cheap (not necessarily the cheapest) or reasonable scaling cost
• Reliable hosting with good support
• Hosted entirely on the host company's hardware

Who would you pick to host this website? Yes, I am asking for a business/company recommendation. Is there a clear answer for this scenario, or a good source that can reliably give the current answer?

I know there are all kinds of schemes out there. I'm just wondering if any one company fills the bill for freelancers and stands out in such a crowded market.

From stackoverflow

• Well, some good VPS solutions that allows for pain free upgrades and are really cheap are Linode and Slicehost. The problem here though is they aren't setup and forget..if they need an upgrade, you have to manually do it. However, with those 2 hosts, you order the upgrade and it is performed painlessly in less than 5 minutes. All your files will be intact.

  Based on your description, though, it sounds like you want a cloud host where you can just set up the server and have it automatically scale to what you need. In that case, you'll want to check out Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.

  David Zaslavsky : +1 more for Slicehost coming from a very satisfied customer ;-) Slicehost is really meant for people who want to get involved in the "dirty work" of maintaining a server, i.e. upgrades and such. If you want to set it and forget it, VPS isn't really the way to go.

  Brendan Long : The benchmarks I've seen show Linode being faster, and it comes with more memory, disk space and bandwidth. EC2 is more scalable (more scalable than 99% of people will ever need), but it's also more expensive and the latency is higher.

• I've used RimuHosting, they have great service (respond in minutes a lot of the time). They'll see you up with a Virtual Server however you want and you get root access and get configure it how you'd like. If you need help with something, they've always helped me very quickly. You can pick between whichever distro or software you'd like.

• I've been extremely pleased with webfaction http://webfaction.com. They have stock installations of several popular applications and frameworks (PHP, Django, Drupal, etc.) However, you're not locked into these. While they don't give you root access, they do give you access to a complete toolchain allowing you to compile and install whatever version of whatever components you need.

  I've compiled and installed Erlang, ejabberd, couchdb, rabbitmq, activemq, openfire on my server with only minor hitches mostly due to ignorance on my part, not their system.

• I've been using site5 http://www.site5.com/ for a number of years now and would definitely recommend them. They support PHP, Ruby on Rails and Python and allow SSH access so you can get quite a bit done. Their support is awesome and they often let you install arb software (they let me have mercurial before it was standard on their setup).