There are some pretty cool options available with the BlueHost plans. The standard stuff, of course, like FTP, CGI, SSL, standard email and webmail etc., but theres support for Ruby on Rails too. Alot of people are moving to Ruby for their web application because the language itself is very intuitive. While it differs from both Perl and PHP, it resembles both of them in structure and syntax, as well as "typed-ness" as well as it being an interpreted language.

Also available are both Postgres and MySQL, in case you need the kind of granularity available in Postgres (some ecommerce packages require one database or the other).

Fantastico is available, which is awesome, and there are four different shopping cart packages available to choose from.

Technical support is a foremost consideration when choosing a web application hosting solution. There are other decisional factors to consider, however. Before choosing a company, the technology that one plans on using for the site must be supported by the server platform. Most providers provide support for basic HTML or XML ( basic markup language). If more dynamic web pages are required, its necessary to confirm with the provider that they support "scripting" languages. The customer service representative should be able to answer these questions, as well as provide some basic information about the type of tools available to you through a management interface that registered subscribers may use to administer their sites.

So which webhosting companies out there fit the bill? Just like shopping at a major chain store, the prices may be great, and the options off the shelf numerous, but its sometimes hard to find a person to talk to when your on aisle 103 looking for duct tape. I've used BlueHost's technical support and while they may not be the biggest, they are a good value and were extremely helpful.