2. If you want a more serious hosting, stay away from those claims to provide unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth.
There is no free lunch, and if you need some stability with your website, avoid these unlimited plans.
Obviously, if you don’t mind all these things, unlimited plans provide great value.

3. There are mainly 4 kinds of hosting plans out there:

• Shared Hosting. This is usually the cheapest, yet you share your space with hundreds of other users on one single server. “Bad neighbor effect” has the potential to bring your site down (Or slow it down). Not recommended for serious website.
• Virtual Private Server Hosting (VPS). This type of hosting plan utilizes virtualization technology (virtuozzo, Xen, OpenVZ … etc). Basically, you have “fewer” neighbors on one single server than the sharing hosting, and you are usually “guarantee” to get your shared of CPU and memory (usually starts with 0.5 CPU and 256MB memory). This is a good start for a small website. Be careful about the control console it offers. Some VPS requires you to install everything from scratch as super user (root). This is very time consuming, and not recommended for someone who is not technical.
• Dedicated Server Hosting. Simply put, you get to use the whole server without sharing with anyone else. This is needed when you expect large amount of traffic. However, depending on the hardware setup, you might still have single point of failure in the event of hardware fails (Disk, network card, cpu failure …etc). Make sure you ask a lot of questions to understand the risks and the expected server uptime.
• Cloud Hosting. This is something fairly new in the hosting market. Basically, a computer cloud is a “group” of physical servers working as a big single server from user’s perspective. This type of hosting, if implemented properly, can bring good balance of value and performance. In cloud hosting, if you have a sudden spike on traffic, you can handle it much better because you can utilize more than one server’s computing power to handle the load. (Remember, it’s a group of servers acting as one)

Here is the list of some legitimate and well know Web Hosting companies in each category:
(The ones with * I have personally used before)

Shared Hosting:
- *BlueHost (http://www.bluehost.com)
- *1and1 (http://www.1and1.com)
- Dreamhost (http://www.dreamhost.com)

VPS:
- *Spry (http://www.spry.com)

Dedicated:
Rockspace (http://www.Rackspace.com)
The Planet (http://www.theplanet.com)

Cloud:
Mosso (http://www.rackspacecloud.com)
*Media Temple (http://www.mediatemple.net)
Amazon EC2 (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/)
GoGrid (http://www.gogrid.com/)

4. Which one to go? Windows or Linux?
When you choose a hosting plan, you need to decide which operation system (OS) you want your applications to run on.
Linux is widely popular, where most people are more familiar with Windows interface. In general, Linux tend to be slight cheaper than Windows hosting plan, probably due to licensing cost. If you decided to go with Linux, sometimes you also get to choose which Linux OS you want to install. (CentOS, RedHat Enterprise, Ubantu … etc)

5. Site performance and stability.
To me, I think performance and stability are the most important things to consider when I pick a hosting. Regardless how much storage space or how much bandwidth a company offers, if the site cannot stay up and running these is all meaningless.
When you want to evaluate a hosting company, Google is your best friend. Don’t just read good reviews, but pay attention to the bad ones too. Check out the company’s forum as well. See what’s the general sentiment of its users.

6. Take advantage of Money back guarantee.
A lot of hosting companies offer money back guarantee. Take advantage of that! After signing up, get a feel of the customer support response time, website performance, stability, and how knowledgeable their staffs are. If you smell something is fishy, try someone else. It will be a lot of hassle to move your production website after it goes live.

7. Some other tips and suggestions.

• In technology world, new things come out every day. If you want to keep your sanity, don’t be the guinea pig. You want a stable hosting plan, not a quality assurance person for the new hosting company. Let someone else do the job.
• Some hosting companies offer affiliate program. You can first sign up as affiliate, then sign yourself up with the hosting plan. In this case, you can probably get yourself 1 year of free hosting.
• Ask people you know who have experience in hosting. There are many “employee disguise as customer” out there in the forums trying to fool you. Beware of that. Ask the tough questions.
• Some hosting review websites are good. You just need to find them. I like the ones that offer solid “data” to explain why a hosting plan is good. Talk is cheap, I want to see evidence.