This. Web hosting is web hosting, it doesn't differ that much. However, a smaller provider can stand out from the big guys by the level of support the smaller provider can offer, the bigger companies either don't care or are too big to offer the personalised support.
I was watching a Webinar yesterday which touched on this. The person explained how their web hosting business fixed a issue on a customers small, personal hobby site who turned out to be the IT Manager for a large company. Guess who got the future business of the large company?
We have also experienced this ourselves too, a customer joined us because their host messed up their website. The customer wanted us to migrate the site but didn't tell us it was broken or what happened, we noticed it during the migration and offered to fix it. We now host all their websites because of the support we offered.