But I've been pulling more than 100 hits a day
Yes, for small things they are fine. A forum site I admin on has an average of:
86,439 hits per day
2,679,619 hits per month
3 months ago I bought a hosting package from Go-Daddy, mirrored the site for testing and it was consistantly dog slow for 3 weeks on MySQL performance. Needless to say I canceled the account. Normal HTML + images was ok though. I'd of hated for it's memberbase to be stuck with go-daddy.
If you want hosting for yourself and a handfull of visitors, cheap hosting is fine. If you even approach anything resembling a regular user base then pay that little extra, it's well worth it.