I hear your pain. I've run into this problem myself. Human on-site support is very rare these days. It simply can't be done for the $5-$15 month shared hosting people offer without way overloading systems.

I use Simpli, based out of San Jose. But they no longer host single web sites. I lease three boxes from them as dedicated servers which I manage myself for my projects and my clients' projects. What they do have is real service, real people, good timely responses; Once when I needed to set something up quick (because another company flaked, as you describe) I got the owner on the phone on a Sunday morning.

Overall I've found running my own servers to be much more reliable than using cheap, over-sold hosting services. But of course this is only something you can do when you get to the scale to support it.

When Simpli sold their individual hosting business, they sold it to a place which does business through 10for10.com/ -- I recently set up a plan there for some small projects I wanted to separate from my other material on my main server (ie, running stock PHP bulletin board software which often has serious security issues and I didn't want on my dedicated server). So far they have been pretty good, but I haven't really had the opportunity to but them through the test when a problem comes up. If you just need one site, I may have room on that plan if you'd like to try it out. Send me a personal note if so.

As for web design; I've found quality web design much easier to come by than quality hosting. I've worked with Susan at bantamdesigns.com/ and Amy at www.smalltownphotographs.com/ who are both talented and small business people I like to support. I've also worked on projects where the design was done by dfsi.org/ -- The quality of work and professionalism of DFSI is great, but they are a larger outfit which sub-contracts work so there is sometimes an issue if you need something changed a year or two later and the same designer isn't still there -- better to make sure you get copies of all the original .psd files as well as the final product.