What's up y'all?  I just wanted to throw in a few things worth mentioning that I've seen and learned in dealing with dozens of registrars and hosting companies as a web designer.  These are just opinions, so use your own judgement - but here's my experience:

First off, bigger is generally better.  You're much more likely to run into problems with smaller companies than with larger well-oiled machines.  The worst issue I've run into was from a friend of mine who's a magician.  He's a world class performer, and a total pro, who's website is important for his business.  He had a former partner hosting his site on a computer in his home.  The partner moved into a new house and didn't tell my friend that his website was going to go down when he moved.  The whole thing turned into a mess and his site was down for weeks.  Not good.  I've had other weird problems with really small companies.  Don't let a web designer rope you into using a hosting company that you don't know anything about.  Do your due diligence.

Also, 24 hour phone support and short hold times is really important to me.  I want to know that if something goes down I can get ahold of someone and get it resolved.  Chances are, unless you're big time and you're paying a lot of money for hosing, you're website is hosted on a shared server.  In rare cases things can happen like where another database from another site that's hosted on the same server will be attacked, for example, and it will cause your site to go down.  If it's my site I want to know that there are people around to monitor these things and that I can call them if I need to.  

There are some technical considerations that in rare cases may come into play, but for 99.9% of musicians I would recommend godaddy.com for domain registration and/or hosting and hostgator.com for hosting.  Both companies have 24/7 tech support and they generally know their stuff.  There are plenty of other decent companies out there, but these are the two that I can recommend with total confidence.  

I recommend avoiding networksolutions.com because their prices are ridiculous and they charge for things like domain forwarding ($13/year) that are free with most other companies.  I've experienced hold times of over an hour with aplus.net when I had an urgent problem to deal with where they were at fault.  I had to make a number of calls to them and it took up waaaay too much of my time that I'll never get back.  🙁  And finally, if you come across a company called Domain Registry of America, turn and run in the other direction and don't look back.  They've been a know scammer for years and have been busted for it in the past.  They charge ridiculous prices and they actually try to deceive people into transferring their domain names to them - usually via snail mail.

I'd love to hear if you've had any especially good or bad experiences with registrars and hosting companies, so please post a response if you have.  Thanks!