For what it's worth---SmugMug is a great company, I think you'll find a lot of people here on the boards that really like them. Yes, you pay for their service, but it's not very much in the grand scheme of things and you get A. full-sized image sharing (whereas other sharing sites compress your photos), B. GREAT customer service and C. really nice prints if you order through them.
Also--you can use a coupon code from another SmugMug user (like mine which is GJWRDoOlV0fr6) to get $5 off of your dues for the year, or you can use other codes like "YAHOO" which I believe is the one I used when I started with SmugMug---not sure if it's still valid.
Good luck and hopefully you decide to go with them, if not, there are lots of others that seem really happy with Zenfolio and Pbase. Although I can't speak of their customer service, I can say that Zenfolio's lab is Mpix.com and they are a GREAT site to get your shots printed from.