This seems to be one of those situations, like so many in life, where you get what you pay for. I tried shared hosting. It sucks. I say that as a local weather site operator and as a professional web dev & server admin. Not saying others here are lying. I haven't tried most of these hosts, although I have worked with several on behalf of clients. I just have different needs because I customize everything myself. Plus I can tell when "support" is giving me the run around.
I would most definitely NOT recommend A2Hosting. They had an outage a couple years ago that lasted for several DAYS. If you were hosted in their Michigan Data Center at that time, so sorry for you! I got sick of the repeated downtime, excuses and poor communication.
So I switched to Liquid Web. It's a Tier IV facility, one of very few in the world. That means, in layman's terms, they've got belt & suspenders with another pair of suspenders just in case. Since I migrated to them last year, I've had zero downtime. But you will pay, because they sold off all their shared accounts. Now they only do VPS, cloud, dedicated plans. I pay just north of $60/mo for VPS. I realize that's out of most people's range, but I thought I'd add my $0.02 since you, too, are an IT guy. You might have to step up to avoid frustration, especially when it comes to support. YMMV.