Things to keep in mind when shopping for web hosting:

• All web hosting choices are not suitable for all needs. You have specific goals which may be completely unlike another web hosting customer. Business web hosting typically requires the most critical cost and feature analysis, but cheap web hosting with looser terms for more casual website hosting needs may be more to your liking. If you are extremely cost-conscious, and your demands are more modest,  free web hosting may be worth looking into.
• Every web hosting review mentions customer service and/or tech support (two different things really, but for now let’s make it simple). Sooner or later (often immediately), you will need to talk to someone. If your web hosting choice is between one who is great about everything except customer service, and another website hosting choice is great on customer service but only good at everything else…well, I would have to recommend the latter. This is not to say that you should choose or stay with poorly performing web hosting because they are a good bunch of guys…simply that customer service, overall, is the single flaw that can totally ruin an otherwise worry free web hosting choice.
• Aside from customer service, the issues that tend to come up in negative web hosting reviews are: speed, money-back guarantees & cancellation policies, and server offline/ downtime. Poor email handling comes up sometimes, and that’s enough to be a little too often — especially for business web hosting.
• Do your homework — don’t let any of the “Best Web Hosting” lists make the decision for you (including this one!). Take them all with a grain of salt, knowing that marketing comes in many forms…and even honest opinions may come down to nothing more than one bad day.
• On the other hand, don’t bother wasting too much time on research. If you simply avoid long-term commitments until you know more, you stay flexible. So what if you spend a month or two with the wrong web hosting choice — you know more than you did before, and you’ll make a better choice because of it (of course, there’s more of a risk with a bad business web hosting decision, compared to a cheap web hosting choice for a more personal or non-critical situation).

Having said all that, there are a few web hosting choices that come up time and again at the top of every list.

1. HostGator.com – popular with “best web hosting” sites. There are also a fair amount of unhappy mentions, which is to be expected from such a widely-used service. With their 1¢/1 month trial, they’re the closest thing to free web hosting you can get from a professional and reputable website hosting service.
2. InMotion.com – another perennially popular website hosting choice. Lots of happy people, a few vocally dissatisfied ones.
3. WebzPro – one of the ones that DOESN’T tend to show up on the “Top 10″ lists. That itself might influence your web hosting choice, for better or worse, but it seems to have an extremely happy customer base.
4. AwardSpace – Another that seems more popular among the actual users than whoever is making those top 10 web hosting lists.
5. SuperGreen AND/OR JustHost – yep, looks like they’re pretty much the same company, and both show up on the same website hosting lists. That alone might make you uncomfortable, but both of them do get many good reviews (and some pretty bad ones). Just remember that online reviews are usually only written by very happy or very unhappy people. Or people who are getting paid.