I'm with 1&1 in the UK and I have found them to be consistently excellent. The site's never been down, usually very fast to serve pages, good support. I can't comment on the selling on of domain names, but if you're doing this even semi-pro you'll surely set up renewals on direct debit. (I do it by credit card and the one time the card expired and I forgot to tell them they sent me an alert and gave plenty of time to sort it out.)

Steve