2. Ask what their bandwidth overage fees are, some charge $5/gig while others as little as $.20/gig.
3. Compare prices, a really lowball price is not a good sign as the company will probably be operating at a loss and may disappear in a few months with little or no notice.
4. Find out about tech support, some offer only email support and only 9-5 m-f, so if your dedicated web server crashes on a weekend you will have to wait till monday morning when the techs report to work.
5. Watch out for web hosts selling used servers with used hard disk drives and that could crash at any time, be sure to read your contract, and make sure you are getting new hardware, especially the hard drives.
6. Ask how many servers they have in service, most companies post this info on their home page, a company with more than 1000 virtual web hosting customers should be stable.
7. If you need the fastest speed then go for scsci drives with raid 5 for speed and redundancy, else save some money and go with inexpensive ide drives.
8. Avoid hosting companies who use cogent as their only upstream provider as they are known for having outages all the time. If a company has 5 or more upstream providers and 1 of them is cogent then you should be fine.
9. If you dont know linux, then go with a mananged dedicated server so the tech staff can take care of os upgrades etc, this will cost a little more but is well worth the money, otherwise pickup a linux book, or read the free linux websites and teach yourself system administration.
10. Consider a virtual private server if you just need to host a few domains and you dont need your own server, this will save alot of money as vps hosting is economical.