Your first order of business is to know what your needs are. Look at this with the big picture in mind, and do not just restrict your needs to the present moment. Although you may not need a lot of different resources to get started, if you plan to build a big business you are going to need them later on. Look for a provider that offer the features that you could need in the future. This will avoid the frustrations that can come with changing your service later.
Is the website you are hosting a private one? Perhaps, it is a family portal that is meant only for your family members, relatives and friends. Or, are they websites that you will promote to the general public to get as much visitors as possible? In that case, your traffic volume will be quite high each month.
If you already know exactly what are the features you will need to build your website, you simply have to look at the feature list that is always provided by any hosting company. (If they don't provide their features list, I don't think you should go with them! ;) ) The most important feature to look at is: do they support the coding language you want to use? You'll also want to know if they have mailing list, databases and email forwarding services. Except that, like most of people you don't know every little things that you'll need. That is why I always recommend to choose the web Hostinger hosting provider that gives you the most features. You never know if you'll need them someday and that day, you'll be very happy to have them because you won't have to change your host.
You might not understand each of these, but as you get more experienced, having a full array of tools to use will make it much easier to manage your site.
Then you will need to look at the uptime. If web hosting companies give you guarantee uptime, look at it carefully. Most of the reliable hosting providers check here will give you guarantee uptime around 99 %.
Is your provider your friend? Well, not if they nickel-and-dime you to death. Not if they sell your email address to every "blue pill" pharmacy west of Beijing. Not if they lock you into a contract for a year. With friends like these, who needs enemies?