Arvixe pricing can be a bit confusing. It actually works out to $2.77/month if you prepay for two years, because they include a free domain name registration, which would cost you $10/year otherwise. And a 10% discount (given as a monthly credit) if you include a link to Arvixe on the home page of your web site. If you google around, you can find coupons that will give you another 10-20% off your first year, knocking it down even more.
The actual prices are $4/month if you prepay for two years, $5/month if you prepay for one year, $6/month if you prepay for 6 months and $7/month if you pay monthly. And all include the free domain name registration.
When I started with them, I paid monthly for the first month, to make sure everything would work properly for me, then I immediately switched to annual because the Reseller plan I have stops discounting the monthly price when you prepay for a year. By the way, I don't actually Resell anything (yet?), but a friend and I do share the account. The real advantage of Reseller is the isolated FileSystems you get for each domain name, which is really great for ensuring that Test Systems don't clobber Production Systems. For example, my Test System cannot even access the databases of the Production Systems!