I found what looks like a good review site for web hosting companies. It measures several criteria, including uptime – “Good web hosts should have at least 99.5% monthly uptime”.

One of their top-rated web hosts, Midphase, has a very simple web site creation service using SiteStudio. See the demo here; it’s impressive. And their sites are only $8/month US including email, unlimited bandwidth, 12 gigabytes of storage, and guaranteed 99.9% uptime. I haven’t tested them though.