I started a new domain recently to let me play around with drawing some comics. In the past, I have purchased my domains and web hosting both through GoDaddy. I have had very few problems with them and have found their customer support very helpful several times.
With a handful of sites already set up under the one GoDaddy hosting account, I decided to start this new one at DreamHost to see what else is out there. I decided to buy the domain through GoDaddy. Everything I read says that you should use separate companies for each anyway.
Everything went without a hitch. It took about 24 hours for the DNS records to get switched to DreamHost. There is virtually no traffic so it is hard to tell anything about performance but it always loads very quickly.
I have a feeling that when the GoDaddy hosting renews early next year that I might move the sites that I want to keep over to DreamHost and keep the domains at GoDaddy.