I actually liked your post because you had good intentions. Although I know nothing of Crucial Paradigm (never heard of them before), the fact that you mentioned them in context with a larger company such as Hostgator means you're on the straight up. You meant well, and I respect that.
However, I just cannot recommend Hostgator to anyone. They have huge issues protecting their customers from botnets, and I spent about 6 weeks trying to get those clowns to recognize that the majority of "traffic" to the group of sites one of my clients has hosted with them. They could probably cut down on their own bandwidth costs about 30% if they took a few days to analyze their customers' traffic and put in a half-decent firewall to protect them from it, but they're not about to do that.
hostingcompanyname reviews is a good way to get reviews on hosts, provided the user knows to take them with a bit of a grain of salt and that there's no excuse for personal experience. Quite a few are obviously either shill reviews ("XYZ Host is great, they're never down and their support is always responsive, the end") or simply don't go into detail about aspects of the business that only a good hosting customer would know about (e.g. control panels, non-standard support issues, how they handle critical situations).