What to look in a good hosting company

I would vote for -

1) 99% and above uptime guarantee
2) 24/7 technical support
3) after sale views.
4) good value for money (at the same time "quality never comes cheap")
5) Plan according to requirements.

What do you guys think we should look into?

I like the words "quality never comes cheap".

99% I consider is not a good uptime. It should be 99.999 or atleast 99.99%.
1% is about 87 hrs of downtime in a year which is bad.

additionally...

you get what you pay for... most of the time

I would recommend good up time, a host that has been in business for a while. Also it seems that the norm is for most hosts to offer rediculous packages. Like 2000mb disk space 40 gig bw for just a couple dollars a month. This practice is called over selling. Look at it like this. The average server hard drive is 80 gig. Now if they sold everyone 2 gig of space for 4.00 a month that would be at the most $160.00 revenue a month for the server. Not likely going to pay the bills, plus you never want to max a server out. Do the numbers and ask the questions. Know what you are really getting.

I definately agree with kevkap. I think a good uptime is important. That way if you make some really large graphics or something then you can get them on there quiker. But, I also like a decent down speed as well. That way if anybody wants to download the graphic or vid from your site then it will eb alot faster.

I'll guarantee 100%. heh.

Automated backup solutions and off-site storage are requirements for me as well.

You're guaranteeing 100% of what?

uptime! what do you think we were talking about?

thats really good daemonguy!

Frankly speaking, there's no such thing as a 100% uptime.

I disagree and I'll put my money on it.

Of course there is such a thing as 100% uptime!

guranteeing 100% uptime means that you wont even have to reboot the server ever. Becuase that would cause a minute of downtime. So I'd take that bet, and things happen that are beyond your controll, lets say the server PSU dies and you have to hot swap the drives out, the sites would be down for a couple of minutes and then you've violated the 100% uptime guarantee. you could gurantee 100% network uptime but not 100% server uptime.

It is possible to provide 100% uptime, but to guarantee it is insane because the server will have to go down at some time or other and when it does your customers will jump all over you.

100% SITE uptime doesn't mean that you need 100% SERVER uptime - if the site is mirrored across several servers, then you can do maintenance on one server while the others actually serve the pages.