The following are some web hosting rating criteria to help you evaluate different web hosting companies:

Price:  A very simple criteria - what is the cost per month for the hosting plan?  Overall value is a subjective measure as a vast majority of websites need very little storage or bandwidth.

Disk Space (Storage):  How many MB’s does the plan allow the user to upload to the site.  Most individuals or companies need the minimum.  If you’re going to stream media, host web albums, or host files then you may need a significant amount of space.  Some companies, like ixWebhosting and Bluehost, offer plans with unlimited storage for suprisingly reasonable prices.  It is important to keep in mind that nothing is unlimited but these large web hosts are able to provide as much real space as you’ll need for web hosting provided you are actually uploading real web content and not utilizing for file sharing.

Data Transfer (Bandwidth):  What is the aggregate amount of data in MB that can be uploaded to your site or download from your site by all users in a given month.  Some sites may be very small, in terms of disk space used, but extremely popular - every time a person visits the site they download the contents of pages which counts toward the monthly data transfer limit.  Also, if large files are being uploaded for data streaming, file storage, or web albums, the size of the files themselves will quickly add up.  Ensure the plan purchased has the amount of bandwidth for your organization’s needs - even unlimited storage plans offered by companies have limits on the amount of data transfer offered per month.
On the subject of data rates, bandwidth usually means the speed of the connection to the Internet (see the Glossary).  Every single Web Hosting company rated and reviewed had redundant, high-speed connections to the Internet.  By high-speed, it means they had enough bandwidth to accomodate thousands of simultaneous connections to their servers.  By redundant, it refers to their multiple connections to the Internet using several carriers so if one carrier fails they still have service.

Reliability:  When you try to visit a website hosted by a company, how likely is it that you will get a Page Not Found error because the Web Hosting company is down.  Consumers and visitors have very high standards concerning reliability.  We never call the phone company and thank them for a continuous dial tone but are quick to curse them if we lose service for even an hour.  The same is true for web hosting - the highest levels of reliability are expected and if somebody is trying to visit your site, you want them to get to it.  As discussed in Web Hosting Explained, it is not cheap, nor is it the business of amateurs to keep websites up, rain or shine, power or no power.  We all know that storms or natural disasters cause electricity to fail for days at a time - hosting companies have UPS’s that kick in to provide power until their large diesel generators turn on to provide power for the entire facility until the utlities restore normal power.  Web Hosting companies can operate indefinitely without power (though their diesel bill would start to add up).  We’re all familiar with operating systems, hard-drives, network cards, and power supplies on computers failing unexpectedly.  Data centers have their applications served on mirrored hosts using RAID arrayed hard drives and other redundant systems.  The bottom line: good Web Hosting companies cannot eliminate failures but they can reduce them to levels where they can promise uptimes of 99.9% in a month.  That means for every minute of downtime, they promise 1000 minutes of uptime.

Security:  The “society of the Web” is a reflection of society at large - criminals abound in both.  The difference is that the criminals on the web enjoy unwarranted noteriety as if their crimes are somehow noble because they’ve figured out how to disrupt information or commerce for millions.  There are forums devoted to hacking and virus creation (perhaps there are forums for car jacking but I haven’t found them) and the number of new criminals on the Net grows every day.  Much of the downtime has nothing to do with hardware or power reliability but can be attributed to network denial of service attacks or other attacks that cause network performance to slow or halt altogether.  Hosting companies must have sophisticated tools and experienced network and application engineers who understand, prevent, or mitigate these attacks when they occur.

Support:  Can you get technical support for your problem when you need it?  Problems seem to rarely occur between 9am - 5pm.  Does the web hosting company offer 24×7 support?  The really good ones offer phone support at all times - most offer online chat which can be effective at resolving problems as well.  Just as import - how well trained is the support staff or could a monkey follow the same script in giving you canned answers to your problems?

Overall:  So which of the web hosting rating criteria is most important? In the end, it comes down to a question of needs and value for the money.  Some clearly provide better value for the money with more space, free domains, or no setup fees.  Bottom line price may be the key abiter for some, others may need more storage, and another may need a lot of bandwidth.  All of the web hosting plans reviewed on this site have superior service and reliability but some are a bit better at customer service.  You can’t really go wrong with any of the web hosting companies but determine which of your web hosting rating criteria are most important and choose accordingly.