Saving Face -- and Money!
How your chosen Web host looks after the server that hosts your site will reflect on you as the owner of the site. If the site is frequently unavailable due to unreliable servers, poor server configuration or the server simply being unable to handle the traffic your site receives, this will give your users the impression that you don't really know what you're doing. This is bad enough with hobby sites, but is of particular concern if you run a virtual store, or have potential employers trying to view your online portfolio.
We'd all like to think that once our site's up and running, it'll always be available to everyone who wants to view it, whenever they want to. But as we all know, this certainly isn't the case. There will always be those times when a site you try to visit isn't available for whatever reason. That is, unfortunately, the unpredictable nature of the Internet.
If your site is a business site, it could suffer from the lost opportunities to take orders or enjoy brand exposure, and personal and hobby sites, too, could miss revenue opportunities while they're unavailable. Even not-for-profit sites can get a poor reputation if visitors find them unavailable or slow to use.
While the potential loss of revenue is the most obvious reason for wanting to choose a good host, your decision can often have other ramifications than simply up-time. Quite often a problem with a host can affect the other services associated with your domain. Services such as email and FTP could also be affected, so you might find that while your site's down, you're also unable to check your email. Worse still, email messages could be returned to the sender, giving your visitors the conclusion that the site no longer exists...

Service Level Guarantees
While undoubtedly some downtime will be beyond our control, we can reduce the risks if we choose the host that is most suitable for the needs of the site. Any host worth their salt should inform you of any scheduled downtime before it happens via email, which will allow you to make alternative plans should you need to. Of course there is no way to predict any unscheduled downtime, but many hosts will offer an uptime guarantee that compensates you in some way for any downtime over and above that scheduled. The hosts that are more confident of their levels of service will usually offer better terms of agreement than will their less competent counterparts.
It's one thing to think that you're covered by these up-time guarantees, but quite another when you think you actually have a claim for compensation. It may be an idea to keep both a print and an electronic copy of the Terms of Service and any other important documents from the day that you purchase a new hosting plan, just in case.
Often problems can occur simply because you aren't able to monitor the site yourself 100% of the time. There are, however, products and services that can carry out various tests to check whether your site is live. But even if you can prove that your site was unavailable to you (or to your monitoring service) for more than the agreed acceptable level, you should always check the small print: if the problem wasn't your host's fault, they may not need to pay up!

You get what you pay for!
One thing to remember is that there is a host for every site. My perfect host could be your perfect hosting nightmare! A server that is well suited for one of your sites may slow down another. And there's no right host, so don't even try to visit and assess them all.
Remember, it's in your best interests to find the most suitable host set up for your site that you can afford, otherwise you can easily get a reputation for being unreliable, unresponsive and uncaring.

Building a Checklist
Before you begin to look for a host for your site, you really need to establish a checklist - a method that you can use to rate and score any host that you're interested in. Of course, before you can assess any service, you'll need to have a good idea about what features you want your future host to offer. This is where a checklist of every feature you're looking for -- and a collection of questions you want to ask -- comes in very handy.
Preparing a checklist before you search for a new host can save you both time and money in the longer term. It forces you to prioritize the various features of your site, which is handy when you have a restricted budget and need to make compromises between features and cost.
This guide has been designed to help you prepare a checklist of features that are tailored to your particular site's needs or expected future potential, regardless of whether you know the type of hosting features you want.
Once you've compiled your checklist, you'll be able to assess much more quickly whether a particular host is suitable for your site. Since many hosts fight for a site owner's attention (and hard-earned cash!), you'll probably find yourself referring to your checklist frequently during your research. But this works both ways - it would be silly to host your site with the first service you came across that matched your criteria, given the vast number of hosts out there. Be discerning.

Rating the Hosts
Once you have put your checklist of features together, you can then use it to help you rate each of the hosts. Exactly how you go about doing this will depend how important each of the features are to you. If you've sorted the features on your checklist in order of importance, then you can simply award points on a sliding scale, 1 point for the least important thing, 2 for the second least important, and so on. Then when you assess each host, award them a point for each feature they offer that's on your checklist, and add them up to reach a final score.
Here are some of the features that I personally look for in a host.
Support for PHP (least important)
User Control Panel
Site Statistics
Support for ASP and Perl
Price below £10 a month (most important)
When I visit potential hosts I compare the features available with my checklist. The example scoring system shown above favors the cheapest hosts first (cost is important to me, as mine is a hobby site). If I were seeking hosting for a business site, then the cost obviously wouldn't be so important, as the quality of the service itself would in this case be the critical element. But whatever bases you use to rate each host, the one that offers the most of the features you want will achieve a higher score.
The sliding scale is probably the easiest way to convert your checklist into a score or rating, but it is by no means the only way. If you have two or more features that are equally important, then you can give them all the same score. However you use the checklist, it's sure to make the process of host assessment easier.

Remember, you get what you pay for.
It's a sad but true fact of life that many of us have very small hosting budgets. While there are hosts out there that can offer a rather tempting deal at pocket money prices, don't expect these hosts to offer the kinds of guarantees that come with similar but more costly packages. If your site is going to be important to your business or livelihood, do yourself a favor and look upon your hosting as an investment rather than an expense. The extra cash helps to pay for things like infrastructure, back ups and security, so if anything does go wrong you'll be in a better position to do something about it.
A checklist is a good way to sort out which hosts are most likely to offer the kind of hosting you want, but there really is no substitute for doing that extra bit of research in newsgroups and on message boards once you have your potential host short list. The people who will know best how a host performs will be the customers themselves, and unfortunately they can be quite hard to track down at times. Having said that, it shouldn't be too hard to identify hosts you should avoid, as most unhappy customers like to share their experiences with likeminded individuals.

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