Most hosting comparisons are feature tables, and features are the least useful basis for the decision. What determines whether you are happy in two years is support, honesty about limits, and how easily you could leave.
These are the questions worth asking, and what the answers tell you.
Start from what your site actually needs
Not from a plan comparison.
Which PHP version and extensions does your application need? How much disk, including mail and backups? Do you need SSH, cron, or a particular database? Where are your visitors?
A short list of requirements turns an overwhelming comparison into a filter, and it prevents the common outcome of paying for a tier you do not use while missing one thing you do. How to Compare Shared, VPS and Dedicated Hosting explains picking the tier.
Ask what happens at the limits
Every plan has ceilings. What matters is the behaviour when you reach one.
Is the site throttled, is there an overage charge, or is the account suspended? Do you get a warning first, and at what threshold?
A provider who answers plainly is telling you something useful. One who says "you will never hit it" is answering a different question. There is more on the words that get used loosely here in Hosting Terms Explained: A Plain Glossary.
Support: scope, hours, and who answers
The thing you buy that you cannot evaluate from the website.
Ask where the line is between hosting support and site support. Ask the hours, and whether they cover your night. Ask what escalation looks like when the first reply does not solve it.
Then test it before committing: send a pre-sales question that requires a real answer (something technical about your application) and see what comes back and how quickly. That is the most informative five minutes available.
Backups: what is included, and can you restore yourself
Three specifics instead of a yes.
How often they run, how far back they go, and whether a restore is self-service or a ticket.
A daily backup kept for seven days does not help with a compromise discovered after a fortnight, and compromises are usually discovered late. Whatever they provide, keep a copy of your own off their infrastructure. For doing that, see How to Back Up and Restore Your Website in cPanel.
Check how easily you could leave
Ask before joining, not when you want to go.
Can you take a full account backup yourself? Is the control panel a standard one, or proprietary, which decides whether a migration is a restore or a rebuild? Is the domain registered in your own name, in your own account?
That last one matters most. A provider who registers your domain as part of the package holds your identity, and that is resolved by negotiation rather than by support. What to Do Before You Cancel or Move Hosting walks through the exit.
Where the servers are
Distance adds latency to every request, and on a page making many requests it compounds.
Choose a location near your audience rather than near you. Ask specifically. A company's address is not where its servers are.
Location may also matter for data protection obligations, and that includes where backups are held, which is the part people forget to ask about. What a Website Needs for Privacy and Cookie Compliance has the detail.
Read the renewal price
Introductory pricing on a multi-year term is normal. What matters is the renewal rate, and whether it is stated.
Also check the refund terms, the notice period for cancellation, and whether the price is per month or billed annually. The headline figure is usually the annual-prepay rate.
A provider whose renewal price is easy to find is being straightforward with you before you are a customer, which is when it is cheapest for them not to be.
Uptime figures, read properly
99.9% is about 43 minutes a month, and the exclusions carry more meaning than the number, scheduled maintenance is almost always excluded, and that is when many outages happen.
Ask what is measured and from where, and how a credit is claimed. Then measure it yourself regardless, because that is the only figure you can act on. Understanding Uptime Guarantees and What They Cover goes into reading them.
What reviews are worth
Ratings are a weak signal, incentivised, aggregated across years, and dominated by people who never had a problem.
What is worth reading is how the provider responds to bad reviews, and whether recent complaints describe the same specific thing. Ten people describing the same fault is information; a low average is not.
Ask in a community where your kind of site is discussed instead of a general one. The right provider for a shop is not necessarily the right one for a video pipeline.
Start small and portable
Take the shortest term you can while you find out what they are actually like. The saving on a three-year prepay is not worth being locked in with a provider you have not tested under pressure.
Keep the domain in your own registrar account and keep your own backups from day one. Those two things mean leaving is a decision in place of a project, and knowing that changes how the whole relationship feels.
Part of the choice is trust rather than features, because the technical access is the same everywhere. What Your Hosting Provider Can and Cannot See sets out what that access includes.
What you are building decides what hosting it needs, and the three approaches differ in year three rather than at launch. How to Choose Between a Site Builder, a CMS and a Static Site picks it up from there.
The same question is worth asking of the registrar, where the answer is reassuring for the name and less so for everything bundled with it. What Happens If Your Registrar Goes Out of Business picks it up from there.
Six questions answered before signing up prevent most hosting regrets. What to Ask Before Moving to a New Host explains them, including the one to ask the host you are leaving.