| 1) Test their support - try out their live chat, email, phone support - ask some questions.
2) Read their agreements - Terms of Service (ToS) and/or Service Level Agreements (SLA) - do they guarantee high uptime percentage in their agreements ? - is it specified explicitly ?
3) Ask them whether they are a reseller or an actual hosting company themselves (with their down support personnel and server farm). As far as possible, go with actual hosting companies.
4) Check that they do not oversell. Overselling a little is ok. But you should avoid hosts that give you a whole truck of bananas (disk space and bandwidth) when you pay peanuts. And, trust me, you don't need a whole truck of bananas if you have a normal stomach - meaning, you don't need anything more than 5GB of space or 100GB of bandwidth if you are hosting something simple. The figures will be different if you are hosting a super duper heavy/popular site though. Don't let hosts tell you that you need super duper large space & bandwidth.
5) Go for hosts that do not need you to prepay for too many months in advance, to get good pricing (eg waive setup fees, cheaper monthly fee etc). Best if it allows you to pay month-to-month or at most, 6 months. Try not to pay 1 year or more as you should not tie yourself down to a host - you should be able to leave without losing money if they turn out to be unreliable/not good. |