I want a single hosting account where I can put up my development sites, and small sites I do for friends, some might be experiments, some might be public. None will get huge traffic. They’ll all either be using PHP roll-my-own or Code Igniter with MySQL.
I’ll want to be pointing multiple domain names at different directories under this account. I’ll also probably make use of rewrites extensively.
I’m not in the US but US hosting is far more economical. Is godaddy a good choice given my requirements? I’m looking at the base account as it allows unlimited domain names.
What i hate about go daddy is their domain registerations are "expensive". With privacy it comes to essentially $18/domain, compared to someone like dreamhost (which has free privacy $10).
I personally use dreamhost to register my domains and rackspace to serve the content.
Their smallest instance is ~12/month.
I like the freedom rackspace gives me, it is a full linux box with whatever you want. Shared hosts often aren’t flexible enough for quirky framework/requirements. In your case, any shared hosting will do as you are using php/CI.
In the end shared hosting is shared hosting. You are sharing a space with other users. If it is experimental then it won’t matter.
Something you wish to consider is "money back policy". For instance I had at one point an account with MOcha host and they only offer money back inside 30 days, limited money inside 180 days. After that, they eat your money. Something to consider.