With web hosting, as with many other things in life, you get what you pay for. Or to be more exact, paying more won't guarantee you better service, but paying little pretty much guarantees that it's bad.
Regarding hosting. There is no such thing as unlimited disk space. On one hand there is always strings attached, be it inodes, or limiting the type of file you are allowed to host, or limiting usage modes or patterns; on the other hand servers with "unlimited disk space" are always overcrowded and slow.
As far as other package limits go, number of databases makes sense, bandwidth makes sense, but limiting the number of add-on and parked domains, and subdomains, is just silly and arbitrary.
If you're looking for shared hosting, look for CloudLinux servers with LVE. This basically creates a tiny VPS for your account, and prevents other accounts from overloading the server and affecting your site. An easy way to recognize LVE (if they don't want to tell you outright) is if they have a PHP selector in cPanel.
Speaking of which, despite the oft stated downsides of cPanel, unless I'm doing a commercial site, I wouldn't consider hosting without it.
Of the hosting companies I've had experience with: off the top of my head, I would recommend AcornHost and Team Holistic / Hot Drupal.
Acorn Host has a hippy "green sustainable community-oriented" front but their packages have a nice set of features, the service is reliable and the support is decent. It's more than enough for a Wordpress site. However, they only have shared hosting so if you ever want to upgrade to a VPS you'd have to migrate to a different hosting.
Team Holistic is an obscure little hosting company, their main site was designed in the 90s, but their hardware is constantly being upgraded, the service is good, and the owner will bend over backwards to accommodate you and help with any problems you have with the site. Hot Drupal (yes I know it sounds like porn), a subsidiary of Team Holistic specializing in Drupal hosting, comes highly recommended. They focus on Drupal, but the servers fully support the WP framework. The (aforementioned) owner is a Drupal expert, just in case you're considering Drupal instead of Wordpress.
And he doesn't sleep.
No, really.
Regarding domain registration, look for a registrar that gives you control of your DNS zone and lets you add custom or more exotic records outside of a single A-, CNAME and MX record. Failing that, one that lets you use remote nameservers (your hosting account's nameservers), where you'd be able to have the hosting's support edit the zone how you want. Look for this when looking for hosting options. And don't go for the "free domain with hosting" offer that hosting firms have, they won't let you take the domain with you if you ever move to a different hosting, and most hosting firms register their domains with the big registrars anyway and then resell to you. Go straight to the source.
Word of advice, once you have the domain you want,
don't forget to renew it religiously. Do not assume renewal is automatic, do not assume billing is automatic, do not assume the renewal went through, check everything three times. If you lose a domain, you're not getting it back.
From what I've seen, this "Wordpress Premium" is just hosting, and I see no advantage over other hosting and domain registration offers. Is there a paid plugin you are particularly interested in? I don't see anything you wouldn't be able to reproduce by customizing the free WP plugins.
And now we've come to the choice of CMS.
Wordpress is much easier to use, requires next to no PHP knowledge, and is pretty much plug and play. It allows customization, supports a variety of features and options, and If you pay attention to the security updates, are careful about what plugins you are installing, use login and activity logging, patch that XMLRPC brute force amplification weakness, and don't jump at every new plugin you see without waiting to confirm it's not a horrible exploit (and for God's sake don't make the admin username "admin" or I will personally go over there and beat you with a brick), it is all you need to create any type of website you want. If you have enough PHP knowledge to get into the code and tweak, all the better.
The downside is, Wordpress scripts aren't optimized
at all, and are notorious for being resource hogs (the biggest one being the admin page, go figure), and it can get bad to the point where you can only have five visitors to the site at the same time before you exceed the hosting environment's resource limits (on a standard shared hosting LVE virtual environment; without it, your site will simply be drowned out by all the other WP sites), and optimizing it on your own is so hard it's easier to just find a different plugin that does the same thing but better.
Drupal is more powerful but also more complex. The whole thing is slightly better put together, more synergistic (at least the site's functions aren't competing
with each other for resources), and allows much more tweaking, but it requires much, much more knowledge in order to develop and manage. You basically end up programming everything yourself.
Whatever you do, if you're serious about developing the site, you'll end up learning to code in the server language of the CMS you choose (and it will be PHP, more likely than not), so like someone said, take one of the smaller site building packages and customize the fuck out of it. The downside is that most hosts only support the major CMS packages (by support I mean make sure it can be installed and run, and the tech support department has the first idea of what the fuck to look for when troubleshooting problems for you), so you'd be entirely on your own from square one.
So yeah. Good luck with your site
