I'd draw your attention to VPS accounts from decent hosting providers: allwebhost.com and owned-networks.net.
They were incredibly friendly and knowledgeable and basically told me everything I needed to get started (it was my first site). Since then the uptime and reliability has been great and the control panel was not bad either! I had an issue with bandwidth recently and the support was great at working out a deal for me. I would recommend them without hesitation!