There are several things you want to consider:

1. Price
2. Customer service
3. Options available
4. Can you upgrade easily

You might think that price is most important, but it is not. The most important feature of a web hosting service is reliability of the servers. If your web host cannot promise 99.9% up time then look elsewhere.

Almost as important is speed. Not all servers are created equal, and some are definitely faster than others.

Good customer service is also very important, especially if this is your first site. Give the company a phone call and see how quickly you get through to a live person.

Another thing to look for is how much disk space and bandwidth they offer. You might not need much disk space and bandwidth to start with, but the more visitors you get and the bigger your site becomes, the more important space and bandwidth become.

Can you easily upgrade if you need more space? How many domains and subdomains can you have? Do they offer reseller accounts? These are all important things to find out.

You might only need one domain hosted for now, but most people do not stop there. They find that if one domain makes a bit of money, then two or three or four will make more money.

If you want to be able to link those sites to each other, you might want to consider a web hosting service that has multiple IPs and C blocks. That prevents the search engines (and nosey individuals) from figuring out that all those sites linking to that one site are all owned and operated by the same person.

Why have several sites linking to one main site? Some people want to do this to increase the main site's pagerank and to funnel traffic to the money-making site.

Other important items to look for are Fantastico, Cpanel, web and FTP statistics, multiple FTP accounts, and multiple mail accounts. Fantastico is a program that will install many different scripts onto your site, such as Wordpress, forums, shopping carts, guest books, and discussion boards. Fantastico is definitely something you want available. Not every web host offers this great service, so be sure to verify that Fantastico is included before signing up.

There are so many different web hosting services to choose from, with more being added each day, that someone new to web hosting and putting up sites might feel overwhelmed. That's why it is so important to read web hosting reviews and to see what services others recommend. If they are using the services that they recommend, then you can know that is probably a good hosting service to sign up with.

Selecting the best web hosting service is very important, especially if you intend to use your web sites to make money. Once you put up a site, it isn't easy to switch to another service. It is possible, but not easy.