Webfaction is one of the best for shared hosting in my experience:

They have hosts in Amsterdam and Singapore, both of which are closer than the USA and so will have lower latency.

Linode is the best that I've seen for inexpensive VPS solutions and they also have European (if you call London part of Europe :-)) and Asia locations:

http://www.linode.com/

And of course there's Amazon, which is the wave of the future, but more expensive if you don't leverage their non-compute services (i.e. S3 for storage, DynamoDB for NoSQL data, etc...).  I would encourage you to try that if your organization can budget it - it will be good for your longer term career because cloud-based services are coming fast and the surrounding skills will be very useful.  For people that have no money, there's a 1 year free trial suitable for self-education:

Cheers,

Adam