Web Hosting Company

Speed and reliability of the servers and hardware
Make sure they have a high-speed connection
(preferably T3 or higher) to the Internet.

*Effective Bandwidth Management – opt for unlimited bandwidth for your site. Actually the bandwidth of an average site is 1G.B per month.

*Backup Systems – good hosts will have back
up systems in place to guard against power failures,
which will cause you to lose data and customers.

Features
Compatibility with existing Software and Skills
Is your host’s server, software and support services compatible with the skills and software you are using like weather the server is window base or Linux base and which one suite your site. For example if you are using FrontPage to create your site, make sure they have FrontPage extensions installed on their server.
Some of the basic features of a hosting service should include:
• Domain name registration
• At least 5MB of allocated space
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Free Technical Support
• POP3 E-Mail Accounts
• Email Forwarding
• Email Auto-responders
• Email Aliases
• FTP Access
• FrontPage Support
• Own CGI-Bin Access
• Free Perl, CGI
• Server Side Includes (SSI)
• Password Protection
• Reseller/referral program
• 30 day money back guarantee

Flexibility and room for growth – Keep in mind the future needs of your web site. If the traffic to your site explodes, or in the future you may need a database solution then your host must be able to accommodate the changes.

Quality of their support services

• Quality of existing customers – ask for any BIG current customers that are hosting with that service.

• Opinions of existing customers – ask for any testimonies of existing customers to get feedback from them concerning reliability and support.

• Stability – you do not want your hosting service to go out of business (like what happened to many of the free hosts) and leave you stranded. Check how many years they have been in business.

• Support and Responsiveness – Make sure you can contact them 24/7 by phone or email. Test the quality and efficiency of response by sending them an email pertaining to some question you may have before you sign up.

SEO Comment
one most important thing which I want to share with webmasters that google is quite picky sometimes about your "neighbors" so just use a reputable web hosting company because sometimes a host server’s ip address can be flagged by google but I am sure this is fairly rare.

Cyberframe