Find Reviews

Lookup the company on webhosting forums and on webhosting directories. If you find no reviews about the company or people have had bad experiences, you should look for a different company.

Research the Company

Find information about the companies website. You can do this by doing a whois lookup . You should look at the companies namesever. If a hosting company has the name server ns1.cheaphosting.net, they may just be reselling webhosting and not own their own equipment. Also look at when the domain name was registered, this will give you some information as to how long the company has been in operation.

Pay Monthly

Many web hosting companies offer 2 months free if you pay anually rather than monthly. It may be more expensive, but if you get into problems with the hosting, you can leave the company without sacrificing too much.

Do they keep up to date?

Ask the company to send you a link to their phpinfo page. This will tell you what versions of PHP and Apache they are using (assuming the webserver is apache and they support PHP). You can see the latest releases of PHP here