If you are looking for a company/site to host your website dont visit the comparison sites which compare hosting companies. It is really inbelievable how much money they make with their top 10 lists and editorial top 10 lists and such. The people at dreamhost posted a nice blog about this practice.
Here are my top 10 tips for selecting a webhosting company (shared hosting):
1) diskspace: if they do not offer at least 20 GIGABYTE of diskspace, run away
2) bandwith: if they do not offer at least 1 TERABYTE of bandwith/month, run away
3) domains: if they do not offer unlimited domains, run away
4) subdomains: if they do not offer unlimited subdomains run away
5) databases: if they do not offer unlimited databases, run away
6) e-mail: if they do not offer at least 3000 pop/imap accounts and unlimited aliases, run away
7) auto installers and “keepuptodate” for common open source packages like Joomla, WordPress, PhphBB, MediaWiki, Gallery, etc…
9) a pre-installed versioning system repository like Subversion
10) Build in statistics system for free incl. access to the raw files
for a Unix host:
11) at least supported: PHP4, PHP5, Ruby, CGI, Perl, SSI,
12) at least 75 unlimited full shell access accounts/FTP accounts
13) Crontab access
Apart from this you should study the Internet if the hosting company is famous, big, old and has lots of satisfied users.
here is one company that ticks off every one of the demands (dreamhost), post any other in the comments
