Make sure that, the company offers support services 24/7 as it is necessary to monitor servers at all times and someone should be available to handle situations in case your site goes down.

Check the agreement: Read the terms and conditions carefully before you sign up. For example, some hosting providers will offer more than 40 mailboxes with each hosting account, while some may offer only 10 and make entrepreneurs pay if they need more than that. In addition, some companies will charge an additional fee, if you wish to terminate your agreement.

Check if they provide monthly/daily reports. It will be helpful for you to monitor your work.

Read feedbacks of their existing/old customers: Don’t assume that you cannot obtain this data. Just go through forums, where you can find a list of feedbacks about their services and read them carefully so you get an idea about their hosting services. If you’re not satisfied by their services, then switch over to another hosting firm.

Call their customer service and ask them any questions related to their services, before taking a decision. Remember, the knowledge of their employees is important.

Check whether their fees are charged on a monthly basis or on an annual basis.

Compare the costs of various hosting service companies, and choose a company which offers services at a rate that is affordable to you.

Confirm whether the service company assures you money back guarantee.

Take a look at the company’s payment method. Some will accept credit cards, while others will take PayPal, some will accept both. It depends on how you want to pay.  If they support Paypal, that would be great as you can request your money back within 30 days.

1. Check whether the web hosting company provides 24 hrs of technical support service. This will help you provide effective services to your users without any hindrance. Nowadays most web hosting companies offer live help through chat applications or instant messages. Choosing such a company will help you fix your problems immediately.
2. The host should be able to provide enough bandwidth for your web site to support huge traffic.
3. A good quality control panel is needed to easily upload contents like pictures, videos etc, to manage email accounts and FTP accounts with ease, and to evaluate the statistics of your website and track the site traffic. This evaluation will help you monitor the report on marketing done through the site.
4. Uptime of the server should be high, where uptime refers to the percentage of time the host is accessible via the internet. Many hosting service providers offer 99 % uptime.
5. If your site involves ecommerce, concentrate more on the security aspect. Check how well they maintain the site security as part of their service, and if they allow you to install additional security.
6. Verify other services, such as email for business domain, databases or multi-media services for streaming media, offered along with the hosting service.
7. Compare the hosting plans of competitive web hosting companies, and find out the company that suits your requirement. It doesn’t matter if the company is big or small, what matters is if it can offer the services you require. Small companies might be able to provide certain customization features which big companies may not be able to offer due to their large number of customers.

The nature of your site plays a major role in deciding the web hosting company. If your site involves uploading of a lot of pictures, such as a photo sharing site, then look for a host that provides high bandwidth. If your site involves online payment, then go in for a hosting company that offers high security.