• To find a good hosting company, you can always search in Yahoo, google and msn for a while. May be you need to go to about 2 to3 pages depth.
• While searching prefer key words like quality, performance, etc. Also you may like to prefer to mention your location with every key word, if you are keen to find a hosting company in your region (which is always a bonus).
• Omit key words like “low cost”, “Cheaper” etc as firstly these are not indication of good web hosting services and secondly the hosting service providers have normally littered the net with these.
• When you start analyzing the hosting companies, you can keep following points with you which not only explain what to look for but also how to ascertain its effectiveness:-
• Feature Offered . These could be:-
  • Space and Bandwidth. First determine how much you need, do not fall prey to big offers just for nothing. Most of these are very simple tricks. Based on years of experience hosting companies know that an average customer does not use more than 100 Mb space and 300 MB bandwidth thus whatever bigger than that is offered is just an offer to attract customers.
  • Email and Database. The number of emails per account should only effect you as per your needs, do not get over influenced by ‘unlimited” when you know you do not need more than 10 in any case. Use of mysql will be important if you need a data base driven site or contents.
  • Other Features . These could be free scripts for guest boot, chat and web development etc. Most hosting companies do have these in their hosting panels. These make things easier for you if you are to use these. So give a plus to hosting company for that.
• What kind of support they are offering ie email only, ticketing system, phone support and a toll free phone. Give an additional point for each service offered. You may need only one of few of these, but eventually it may be important to have a hosting service provider with more kind of mechanisms to be reached to.
• Note the response time to your sales requests. Better host respond within 4 hours. Note that the auto responder is not to be rated as response, though that does indicate a bit effort.
• Do they have physical office location. It may be a indication of serious business, this also ensures that you do not run into part timer. You can always ascertain it from the contact us page, by calling them, seeing if only a mobile number is given and not a land number etc. Its not that a part timer or the one who cannot afford an office location cannot be good in provision of services, yet generally the one with physical offices may mean a bit more settled ones. This may not be totally true in all cases
• Price / Cost. Not always the ones who are cheaper are good and not always ones who are expensive offer high quality services. Better is to stay away from two extremes in cost. Mostly one can think and expect that the ones asking a bit higher prices should be able to afford management of things better.
• Popularity A web host might have the best feature offered, unbeatable customer support and reliability in place but without an effective marketing plan, it will go bust too. Let’s face it. If a web hosting provider does not have sufficient members and steady growth of new members, it’s very difficult to survive in this highly competitive industry.
• Do not go for the more than 2 to 3 pages in search engines. The hosting company should be effective enough to appear in these pages.
• Sponsored listing shows interest of company to promote themselves but not always an indication of good hosting company.
• Read reviews and see top 10 list. Though in most cases these are the ones haunting the net with their money and not always quality.
• Reliability
  Every web hosting service provider will have more than 99% listed on their site. But few have the courage to provide independent prove of their uptime. Ask for it. A hosting company should always have a monitoring service and should be able to provide you a report of the same.
  Compare and test speeds here.

Hopefully following most of these aspects will be useful for you in finding a good web hosting company on the net.