For a long time now I've been running my websites from a server I setup in my basement ( running Ubuntu of course ;] ). The positive to it was hell, I had my own dedicated server with full physical access to it and full administrative control over. The negative to it was that it ate a lot of bandwidth, and some things were loading a bit slow. So I moved to paid hosting.
I decided to go with Cirtexhosting.com. I was with them before I got the server, they have great customer support and a ton of features. The only thing I don't like is the new version of Cpanel, but I'll get over it. So yeah if you're looking for hosting, go with them.
Hopefully you see a faster load time, and I should have my site setup and running soon (it's been showing a boring project page for a while now).