Hostgator is not cheap! They are expensive as hell! Stable Host was pretty good, but I had bad experience with the support staff, they are rude and they have a I dont give a shit attitude. I also heard other peoples experienced the same customer service I received, the staff always give this one line: We don't want your kind of people, we have refunded your money please go some where else.
I've been around the block with bluehost, hostgator, webair, arvixe and some others.. It comes down to preference and support turnaround. Be sure to ask about IP and locations for better idea where they are going to put your site - once you have IP you can ping servers and make sure you like what you will be using.
If you're comfortable with configuring a VPS, you can get some really cheap/low resource setups for about $4/month. If not, hostgator is the way to go.