There is no mean to purchase a cheap hosting account if you don't get quality. Say you got a vps for $5 but if its keep crashing all the time then it doesn't make sense to purchase it.

I also had a bad experience with my past hosting services. I am running a online business, i expect good results by good Up-time of my web sites with good Quality. I got my hosting plan from the site TuckTail.com and I am actually quite happy with their services. I tried them with a shared hosting plan and then as my site grew, I upgraded to VPS. Now I am using 3 VPS from them now - 2 of which is Linux and one is Windows.