Some other factors that people don't think of when choosing a web hosting company are: geographic location, geopolitical situation, supporting regional infrastructure, emergency preparedness and physical security.
Geographic location: Where is the datacenter located? What are the natural disasters that are likely to hit it? This is important because natural disasters can take a datacenter down for extended periods of time. For instance a datacenter located in parts of California might be subjected to severe earthquakes, while a datacenter in Florida runs the risk of getting hit by a major hurricane.
Is the datacenter located in a floodplain? Once when looking for a web host I came across a datacenter in an old brick warehouse that was located on the Mississippi river in the flood plain. If the river left its banks, you could pretty much be assured that the web host was going to go offline.
When looking for web hosts, I look for datacenters that are located in geologically and climatologically boring areas. For instance, my current web host (Pair Networks) is located in Pittsburg Pennsylvania, and is well above any floodplains. Pittsburg PA is well outside of any major threats from severe and destructive weather like hurricanes or tornados and is also in a geologically stable part of the country.
Geopolitical situation: How stable is the area politically speaking? For example a few years ago California had serious problems with their electrical supply in part because of regulatory problems. This caused serious electrical shortages and rolling blackouts. Americans sometimes forget that there are datacenters in other parts of the world. What is the regulatory climate where the datacenter is housed? How stable is the government? Is there regional strife? For instance, would one really want to host a website in China or even Israel?
Supporting regional infrastructure: Having a great datacenter isn't enough, how good is the regional infrastructure?
How reliable is the electric supply (think California a few years ago)? If an area does not have a modern electrical supply infrastructure or if the infrastructure could become compromised by severe weather there could be reliability problems and the datacenter may be forced to rely on generators more than it should.
How robust is the communications grid? When I first started my website, I was living in Fairbanks Alaska and hosted my site with a local ISP. The problem was that there was really only one communications cable between Alaska and rest of the world and it seemed some fishing trawler would take it out at least once a year. When this happened all communications had to be transmitted via Satellite and this ground everything to a slow crawl even by 1996 standards. I now live in Maine and a few years ago a backhoe took out an overhead fiber optic cable near the state border with New Hampshire. While there were multiple telecommunications providers in Maine and the company I was working for had multiple T-1 connections from two different providers for their WAN, it turned out that both providers were using this same cable and as a result the company's WAN went down for at least a day or so until the cable was fixed.
The web host having multiple redundant telecommunications, providers is very important, but it is also important that each telecommunications provider is using their own cables and in some geographic areas this is not the case.
Emergency preparedness: Even the best electrical systems can go down, and there always seems to be some errant backhoe operator gunning for fiber optic cables. HVAC systems, routers and servers fail. How prepared for these events is the web host you are using? Do they have backup generators? How long can their generators run? Do they have emergency refueling contracts in place? Do they have redundant HVAC systems? Do servers have multiple network cards connected to different routers? Do servers have multiple mirrored hard drives? Do they run complete tape backups on a nightly basis? How long does it take them to swap out a server when one goes down? Do they have spare servers waiting around just in case? Can you live with your website going down for an hour, a day or a week?
Physical security: What security measures are in place to protect the datacenter? Is access to servers limited to a select core of employees? Do they use closed circuit cameras to monitor the datacenter? Are visitors allowed into the datacenter? Having a well hardened server does no good if one is able to gain physical access to a server. Good hosts have multiple layers of security in place to keep unauthorized people from gaining physical access to servers and the datacenter's network (routers, switches, cables, etc.).
Reliability goes well beyond a friendly support staff and good server hardware. If your website is important and reliability is important to you, investigate the infrastructure your web host is using. Oh and don't expect the most reliable hosts to be cheap, because a datacenter with this kind of reliability is not cheap to operate.
One final note if reliability is really important and down time is not acceptable, do not host your site on shared servers because on a shared server your site will always be at the mercy of another website going bad because of a sudden popularity surge or bad website programming sucking down all the processing power.
For the record, I have been using Pair Networks for around six years now.
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