Best Hosting in US?

If you're looking for basic Linux hosting for under $10 a month, there's really no answer to your question. For every popular host out there, you'll hear stories from people who say they've had rock-solid performance and reliability all the way, and you'll hear stories from people who say their experience was a nightmare every day until they went to a different host.

Here are a couple of legitimate rating sites (many rating sites are just advertising fronts).
http://www.whtop.com/
http://www.webhostingstuff.com/

Unless you're hosting a mission-critical ecommerce site with heavy traffic, I'd suggest basically throwing a dart and going on a month-to-month basis (I would never pay a year in advance!). As long as the host works out, fine. If the host becomes unreliable or gives bad service, you can move to the next host.

Hey, don't work without a PHP debugger. Several free IDEs have this features built in. Two are NetBeans and CodeLobster. Without a debugger, it's like you're driving with a blindfold on -- you are going to crash!