How to pick the right blog hostin?

Many bloggers wish to host their blog but do not know how to pick the right blog hosting. While things might look a little complicated from outside at first, choosing a suitable web hosting for your blog is pretty easy when you are informed.
In case this is the first time you are starting a blog, high chances (99.9%!) that a shared hosting is what you need. Don’t bother looking into VPS or dedicated hosting as in most cases your blog will not need that much of resources for (at least) the next 6 to 12 months.
(I recently met a guy who wants a cloud hosting account for his not-eh-hem-so-popular blog and no matter how hard I explained, he still think going cloud is the right thing to do. Hopefully he could read this post and save the money for better purpose.)

How to judge a web host is right for my blog?

Anyway, back to our topic. Here are some of the common features to look into for a blog host.
Disk storage
Most shared hosting deals nowadays come with unlimited disk space but honestly, you don’t need that much. Unless you are storing piles of hi-res images, else 100MB of disk space should be good enough (with images hosted on Flickr, PhotoBucket); 500MB should be able to keep you going for at least two years.
Monthly data transfer (or, bandwidth)
With the help of social bookmark sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, it is very possible for a brand new blog to hit 10,000 – 15,000 unique visits in a day, which in other words, huge demand for bandwidth.
However, bandwidth shouldn’t be your main concern as (again) most shared hosting providers offer unlimited bandwidth these days. Moreover if you are getting that volume of traffics, the CPU load is more likely to be the bottleneck that will cause a temporary suspension on your account, not bandwidth. So in short, bandwidth is something you need to consider when choosing a blog host but it’s unnecessary to stress too much on bandwidth.
If you wish to learn more, check out my previous input: How much bandwidth do you need?
Server uptime
All servers will suffer some downtime. Hardware failure, programming bugs, human’s errors, server maintenance… there are unlimited ways to turn a web server down. Hence, it is impossible to get a web host with 100% uptime. In my opinion, any three to six months uptime record with more than 97.5% is a go; and, anything more than 99% with less than $5 hosting cost per month is a steal.
CPU Usage
The limitation on your account’s CPU usage is what makes unlimited hosting limited. Most web host will not give understandable value. Some will tell you can goes up to 5 – 10% CPU power but they never tell you what kind of CPU is in use. 5% of what, Pentium III 733 MHz? You’ll never know. The CPU usage is a grey area where most web host will not talk about it officially in the TOS.
From what I knew, some hosts will allow maximum CPU usage up to 5-10% (which is already very good). However, I believe 1-3% sounds more logical thus if it happens that you get a chance to ask about it before picking up a web host, you know what to expect. (my guesstimation: assuming 200 sites sharing the same server hence each get 1/200 CPU power; half of the registered sites will be in dormant mode so the max should be somewhere around 1/100 CPU power).
There’s another thing you need to keep in mind – blog or CMS software are often ‘heavy’ database users thus it is in fact part of your responsibility to keep the CPU usage low. If you are running a popular WordPress blog, installing WP Super Cache is highly recommended.
Pricing
Dedicated and VPS hosting prices vary a lot but for shared hosting, standard monthly cost range from $3.50/mo to $10/mo. Unless there is a special reason behind, else anything above $12/mo is a no go. Remember, you shouldn’t be spending too much on the hosting at start, especially if you are a part time blogger.

Bottom line: You just can’t judge a host from outside

Reality: It is impossible to know how good or how bad is a web host from outside. Reading TOS and checking on the hosting features will only help filter a few obvious bad apples. To further investigate on a web host, (honest) hosting reviews and users feedbacks are what you need.
And since judging from outside will never work well, why not test the web host yourself from the inside? After all, this is why we have free trial period. Just keep track on the service quality for the first 30 days and do not hesitate to ask for a refund if you find anything fishy (that’s how you leverage the trial period ! ).