I can't stand articles that go on and on and tell you the obvious to fill words on a screen. We all know the host should have some awards or something backing it, they should have a money-back guarantee, and they should have a better than or equal to standard industry pricing, and solid customer support.
So what is industry standard pricing?
About $100-$150 a year should get you about 300GB of storage and 3000 GB of bandwidth. Your domain name should be free as long as you're hosting with them, you should have MYSQL, Frontpage extensions, PHP, PERL and unlimited POP3 accounts.
Who are web hosts that provide this and have the decent rankings?
HostGator.com has a lot of awards and pretty standard pricing. Lunarpages has an enormously loaded package and a lot of addons for an affordable price. 1&1 has a little less but excellent technical support.
So once again in a nutshell:
The obvious things: money-back - should have won an award from a major top 25 list - (you can view this list on HostNews.com Top 25 Web Hosts, or see them on sites like TopHosts.com and HostIndex.com)
Be a little more aware, however of sites like top-10-web-hosting-review.com type sites. I'm not sure that domain is real, but this concept is common. These sites are just affiliate listings, granted most of the providers are pretty decent but they're not real industry rankings. Objective rankings are more common from sites like TopHosts.com or well-established sites like HostIndex.com, or WebHostDir.com or TheWhir.com, or WebHostMagazine.com. You can find a list of all of these sites at HostNews.com Top 25 Web Hosts
HostNews.com Web Hosting Resource