If you're in the US or Canada you should definitely sign up for 1&1's free hosting deal. It's almost the same package that I use already (from the UK version of the company), but completely free for 3 years.
The control panel I get is graphical, slow and irritating; the online support is useless and the email support never really gives you what you want (for example, I can't work with Unicode as they're running an older version of Perl and won't install extra modules). The server though is really fast and hasn't been down at all as far as I can tell, which is why I'm still there.