I am with powweb for the past 2 years and I have tried quite a few other websites as well.
The #1 reason I choose powweb was that they have strong community forum (20,000 people) where their customers offers help to each other and get support from staff. (Open forums shows that they are confidant about their service and it also shows they have more than 20,000 websites hosted with them.)
#2 reason is Bandwidth 5 GB per day (thats 150 MB per month). Theirs is by far the best I have seen in the $7 range.
#3. Awstats preinstalled.
#4. Free domain name, extra 6 months hosting for first order, and the discount. Quite a powerful control panel (their inhouse development).
They allow .htaccess files, with which you can write any redirection script (faking subdomains and dynamic pages to static pages is possible with .htaccess. Not many webhosts allow this as this could take some cpu cycles.)