There is a lot of shit advice in this thread.
Hostgator, Bluehost, GoDaddy and the like are all acceptable for run-of-the-mill hosting. I don't have any experience in their dedicated boxes, so I'll admit they could have decent offerings for those.
Managed Wordpress hosting is NOT a joke/scam, as one comment mentioned, and can be a very worth-while investment for profitable sites that need to focus on marketing rather than technical issues.
The gist is that with managed hosting, you get rolling backups that are often 1 click restores (comparable to a $5/mo service from CodeGuard type sites), a built-in CDN in some cases (compare to a $9/mo service) and a lot of other shit too. For example, with the Synthesis managed wordpress hosting, the offer their Genesis framework for free for any site hosted with them.
You'll be paying more than than the service is worth if you were doing it yourself on a dedicated server, but for $100/mo not having to worry about shit sounds pretty good.
Full disclosure, I used to have a WP Engine account, but cancelled for a number of reasons. The main reason, it was my first eCommerce site and it wasn't making enough money to justify paying that much for hosting. Secondly, their support started slipping when they began expanding as a business. This is understandable, but still a bitch to deal with. They went from being the absolute best service, to being annoying and difficult to deal with. The main reason, which was actually an aggregate of a bunch of little technical issues, was how they calculated account usage. They counted bot traffic as site hits, they counted static resource access as hits (think email embeds, image embeds on other sites, etc..) and other slightly technical aspects of server resources. Considering they bill based on resource use, I called bullshit. I don't want to be billed for google and the like crawling my website???
They got hit with a outrage from customers and I suppose a lot of people dropped their accounts because they began singing a different tune, and have reversed many of those policies. Personally, I find it odd they even explain the dynamics of how they count 'hits' to websites for a service that is marketed to the non-technically savvy. I'd consider just having a rolling adjustment algorithm to keep hit count reporting close to what people would be seeing in their google analytics, and bake the rest into the price.
I took a bit of a tangent; the take-away here is that if your site is making money, and you're looking for managed Wordpress Hosting, you need to get outside of the realm of regular hosts like Hostgator/Bluehost, GoDaddy, and etc... WP Engine and Synthesis are the two managed hosts that are very popular, with WP Engine more so. Both are great, and come down to what you want to focus on. If you are only going to have a single site you are hosting, Synthesis is probably a good choice for you. If you're trying to get two birds stoned at the same time, WP Engine allows 10 installs, 100K visits, and unlimited data transfer across all sites on their $99/mo plan, where as Synthesis offers 2 installs 20K daily views, and 3gb data transfer.
