Managed hosting for Wordpress

I was just looking into Wordpress again and think I might be ready to bite the bullet. While creating an account on their .com site would be easier, I think I'm more inclined to use the software from their .org site instead. It's a lot to wrap my head around, but it seems like the customization is just a lot better if you do it yourself and don't rely on wordpress.com to do a lot of the maintenance for you.

With that being said, I don't really know anything about the back-end of WP. I really don't want to be bothered with the maintenance and extra hassles that come with it. From my research, this means I should be looking at managed hosting for my site. I was just wondering if anyone here might have done the same and, if so, do you have any recommendations? I really don't know what's out there and don't want to deal with a host where accessibility is an issue. What is a fair price for this sort of service too? My site isn't for business or anything, so I don't expect high traffic or the need for something overly elaborate.

Also, I listened to a recent Applevis podcast about Mars Edit -- do you have to have your site on wordpress.com for that app to work or will it still allow you to edit your blog if you're running the WP software through a different hosting service?

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can offer!