We have to consider the following factors to select a hosting company to host our website.

• Support: Yes, We need to have best support always. Why? Because things WILL break. That is the rule of technology. When there is a problem, how easily you are going to get them back up and running correctly. This is a very big deal with any web hosting provider (yes, even to me, where I know how to fix 90% of the problems I encounter. When there’s a problem I need fixed, I want a company that’s going to fix it at free).
• Flexibility of the servers: When you want to install a piece of software on your hosting account (trust me, at some point you WILL want to do this), if the software won’t work on the server you’re going to be pretty ticked! I was.
• Features: Does it have cpanel? Fantastico? phpMyAdmin? cron jobs? tutorials? There are ton’s of features hosting accounts have. Some of them have all of them (I know a few of them leave out key features like cpanel (control panel). I didn’t know that until after I bought them because I assumed everyone had the key features you need in hosting. What a mistake! I have yet to find a feature I wanted that Hostmonster didn’t have.
• Reliability: Duh! If it’s not reliable, why even bother. You’d be surprised at how much downtime some hosting companies have even when they “guarantee” 99.9% uptime.
• Techie Friendly: Yeah, I’m a techie. That doesn’t mean anything for you. Except that I am a power user and I use hosting accounts to their extreme. Hostmonster let’s me SSH into my account. Most hosts won’t let me do that and it ticks me off. If you’re not a techie, and you ever have a techie help you with something, you’d better make sure your hosting account can accomodate them or they’re going to have a hard time fixing your problem. Hosting accounts that don’t have SSH access tick me off!
• Addon Domains: This might not be a big deal to most people, but for me it is. I have hundreds of domains. I don’t want to keep track of (or pay for) dozens of hosting accounts because they only let me host 3 or 10 domains on them. With Lunarpages I don’t have to worry about it.
• Linux VS. Windows: For a web host, you want linux. Period. All the hosts I’ve used have linux hosting (I would never touch a windows web hosting environment. It’s just asking for headaches and hackers)