Sometimes it is often a hard thing to select a particular hosting company for your site; you get to see all kinds of services, cpanel,50 MySQL Databases or unlimited, PHP vs4 or vs5, Debian or windows OS, the list is so much that you get confused if you do not take your time to review  and compare other web hosting companies. I have seen web hosting companies with a face price as little as $4.95/Month and this looked great to you because you are likely to pay for one year hosting service which will cost you roughly $60. Now Imagine after you upload your site and there was a problem that is not likely to be from your codes  and you complain to them and the refer you to their tech guys who will tell you to give then 24hours to fix what ever problem it is only for that 24hours to turn in to eternity. It is not a good feeling at all, especially when your site should have commenced its purpose.
Against this back drop i did some findings on the things that a web hosting company should have on ground before you consider hosting with then. There are basically 7 things to checkout in a hosting company before you think of having then as you host company. This is particularly for those of us that host on LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP). i have written an article on this and you can read about it in my blog  http://www.krisama..com . I hope it will help newbie webmaster on there way to hosting their first site live on the world wide web