Which Type Of Web Hosting

I need to switch two corporate web sites from a provider which has been providing spotty up time and poor reliability especially on their email servers; worst thing about them is that when they're down we get no notice, until we notice or customers complain. We've had outages for email that lasted as long as 72 hours. I'm not sure how our service is configured there, but I would guess shared hosting.

I understand the differences in shared hosting, virtual private or dedicated server, and dedicated hosting unmanaged or managed. What I'm not sure about is what would be best for our needs. If I dont get other advice, I'll probably sign up for shared hosting with a provider that has other service types available.

We do not do any E-commerce, but our website is our advertising and if we're down we can lose sales. Our customers need access to documentation downloads and get upset if we're down. Our current site has shown these statistics on average per day: 3000-4000 hits, 3000-4000 files 200 visits. Our monthly bandwidth was a maximum of 2GB over the past year. We need less than 50 email addresses.

Phone support is necessary, 24/7 would be nice. We need server monitoring and security, good uptime and reliability statistics or a guarantee. Control panel and statistics would be nice. We dont need any website design tools.

I've used Futurequest for a website in the past but their geared to E-Commerce and have no phone support. I have some websites registered with Dotster but they're very light on support. A colleague has used Lunarpages for similar businesses, I think, and he recommended them. He indicated they were good for him with phone support.

If you're still reading, I'd appreciate any guidance, both for type of service and for specific providers.