When you go searching for web hosting you will encounter a sea of offers (many of them in SPAM) and a legion of companies that offer seemingly the same services.  There are some rules that will help you not get burned that I live by and while they may not seem fair to the little guys, they are meant to minimize my (and your) pain in the long run.

Start with bigger companies with bigger facilities.  It is very painful when your site is not being served no matter what you intend the site to do for you.  If you go with a small, Mom and Pop style hosting company then you run the risk that they suffer an outage and are exposed by a lack of redundancy.  Larger providers have big, expensive data centers that are designed to endure power and even major Internet outages without letting their clients down.  Another aspect of this same quality in a web hosting provider is that larger companies don't go out of business as regularly as smaller ones.

Going direct is overrated in that most of the major hosting providers have resellers that sell the exact same services, but often will undercut the real provider on price.  You get the same server, in the same datacenter and even talk to the same support engineers, but with the added benefits of better price and an extra layer of management to yell at when things go wrong.  My current favorite in this space is SRAWeb.Net who front for Godaddy.com.  As I find others that meet my standards they will be added to our list at the bottom of our left navigation area, but it is all about getting the best advantage you can.

Once you identify a few competitors then look to price per feature.  It is unlikely that a smaller hosting provider can compete so while you might like to support small business, the consolidation of the hosting industry has already happened so don't expect them to be there too long.

Knowing what you want is half the battle and usually will allow you to use those well tuned consumer skills to make a decision once you have gotten this far.