When choosing your web hosting company, it is useful to have your list of criteria well defined. 

You need to have this list before you start shopping around, or else you will be sold features you don’t need and, worse, missing business-critical ones. 

Below are my prioritized list and some notes. Keep in mind that as a developer, I prioritize flexibility over ease-of-use. 

1. Enough disk space for what the website needs. When starting, 20GB+ will work.
2. MySQL database – I don’t think there is any hosting without this, but make sure you have it.
3. Speed – this usually translates into have SSD drives on the server.
4. SSH access – I need this for automated backups and for the flexibility to add automatic maintenance script on the server. 
5. Ability to send email – be careful with this; some hosting do give you this feature on paper, but it is not actually working because the email gets discarded on its way out, and there is no back reporting on it. If you have an online store and you need to send out order confirmations, lost email can be very frustrating to you and your customers. 
6. cPanel access – I need this as a developer because I manage many websites, across many servers, and it is faster for me to work with a familiar piece of software. When cPanel is an option, I know I can set-up things quickly, and there are also plenty of diagnosing tools. Even if you are not a developer, you will likely hire one at some point, and it will be easier for them to help you with cPanel access. There is one more reason to have cPanel. And that is, you can quickly move to another hosting company, by simply exporting your cPanel data from the current hosting and importing it on the new one. Without this option, moving to a new hosting company can be troublesome and time costly. 
7. Let’s Encrypt feature for automatic HTTPS – this important to have, or you will need to pay additional hundreds of dollars for it. 
8. On-demand backups; You need to be able to do a full account backup at any time and do this for free. Backups are a form of insurance, don’t underestimate them. 
9. Excellent support – this is close to the last option because if I have the ones above, I can usually sort out any issues by myself. But you may want this much higher on your list.
10. Unlimited (or alt least 3) subdomains. Subdomains can be used for testing something out of sight from the main website. They can be used for multi-language websites. For memberships set-up. And in advanced cases for performance reasons. So make sure you can have some.
11. And finally, there is price. I’ve learned my lesson well: cheap web hosting will cost you more in the long run, in lost business, frustration, and customer satisfaction.

If you plan to use a WordPress site, the hosting I am recommending right now is SiteGround. It meets my criteria as a developer, but it is also friendly enough to recommend it to non-developers, because of their fantastic support.