The first step to finding a web host is to find out what you need for your site. Most of the time, people will way overestimate and buy far more than they need or they will buy a package that just does not have the features to suit them. The first thing is to decide which platform you want to host on, either linux or windows. Windows hosting is generally more expensive than linux hosting and in my personal experience, not needed unless you want to host asp or asp.net applications. If you wish to use a database driven website with php, then definately go linux as windows PHP has certain problems at times. After you have chosen the platform, you need to guage about how much space/bandwidth you need in your hosting plan. Most hosting companies offer several plans ranging in space/bandwidth so be sure to get an accurate prediction on how much you will need. Do not overestimate too much on this step or you will be spending needless money. Unless you plan to be hosting a downloads site, a site with larger than 500kb files on average, a streaming video site, or something like that, you probably do not need that much space and bandwidth. For starters, 200mb space should be sufficient for most sites.

Bandwidth is the other issue and probably the one people tend to overestimate the most. Just because your site may get a couple of hundred visits per day does not mean you need globs and globs of bandwidth. If you have less than 1500 unique visitors a day and you site is mainly text files with a few images, probably 5-8 GB of bandwidth per month is enough to host your site on. Bandwidth is calculated in the following way(except for download sites):

Average size of page(include images, flash, streams)*number of pages viewed per visitor*number of unique vistors per day*number of days per month.

So take for example an busy site with about 35kb pages,has about 1000 unique visitors per day, and gets perhaps 5 page views per visitor:

35kb*5*1000*30=5.25 Gigabytes of bandwidth per month.

For download sites, you must take into account the size of the downloads and how many downloads per visitor.

After figuring out the space and bandwidth requirements, also take into account other things, such as scripting support, database support, and control panel. For newbies in web hosting I suggest a host that has Cpanel, a user-friendly control panel for managing files, checking basic webstats, setting up, database, etc.

To keep a look ahead for expansion, you probably want to make sure that your host or plan has some scripting support(PHP,PERL, ASP) and has database support(MySQL,MSSQL,PostgreSQL, MSACESS) as most large sites are database driven. Also make sure your host has a good upgrade plan if your business or site grows large. Many prominent companies allow you to upgrade or downgrade plans for free. Some hosts will even let customers switch to a dedicated plan for free.

The last step is actually contacting the host and measuring their response times and response tone to customers or potential customers. If they are fast, helpful, and provide good information, then you have probably got a solid host to host your site with.