I agree about the godaddy hosting. I had a client with them and they downgraded the functionality of the webstats program that comes with the hosting account to coax people into their 'new' paid stats....not cool!
I host all my sites with
www.apixl.com - a cpanel host (trust me, you've got to have cpanel!)
It includes fantastico which has dozens of open source scripts you can install very easily through the control panel. Joomla is awesome for community sites, cubecart equally cool for ecommerce....I could go on because I just love it! Most are template based so changing the look is fairly easy too.