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Recently, we've been dealing with some web hosting issues with our current company.  They've changed our tech support package on us, and they were bought out by another company -- all without one email communication to us. We found out after the fact.

The story has a happy ending, as we've found another great host, and we're in the process of moving our sites.

This isn't the first time in my web career that I've dealt with icky web hosts.  Some cardinal rules of finding the right web host:

•  You get what you pay for. If it's the cheapest host on the block, don't expect much in terms of uptime (i.e. the amount of time the server is "up", and not "down") or in terms of customer support. And sometimes, you really need support.
• Find out about their connection to the internet.  As we here in the rural northeastern US, not all internet connections are created equally. We're near the end, if not the end, of the internet out here. There's not a lot of big "pipes" that go through our area. When you're in a big city, there's a lot more chance of more than one big pipe serving the server farm where your hosting will be kept.  So, for example, if the Sprint network is down, the Verizon network might still be up.
• Find out about their physical location. Some people learned this during Hurricaine Katrina.  Personally, I would not want a server located in Florida, due to hurricaine season. I might be concerned about server farms located in the basement of a building due to flooding possibilities.
• Find out about their backup system. Everyone assumes a host makes backups, but what kind? Are they able to roll back files on an individual basis, or do they have to roll back the entire site, due to the type of backups they make? How frequently are backups done? Do they have a whole backed up server, so if your server goes down, they can plug in the new one and move on quickly? Do they have a backup location, i.e. they're flooded in New Orleans, so they can switch servers to their Chicago location?
• How about customer service? How long does it take to address a trouble ticket? How long does it take to get a site that's down, back up again?

These are expensive features, and the more belts and suspenders you ask for, the more expensive your hosting will be.

This may be irrelevant to most freelancers. If your clients are small mom and pop shops, they may prefer to pay $100/yr for hosting, and deal with it if the site goes down for any period of time.

But if your client is larger, or their site gets significant traffic, it's worth spending the money for having these backup systems in place.

Servers go down all the time. Locally, we have an ISP who had a fire at their location about 2 years ago. The ISP says they're really a phone company and an internet service provider, and they provide hosting as a service to their clients, but they're not really a hosting company. Yet one of my freelance clients, who had insisted on hosting with them because they provided internet service to their business location, had their site down for three weeks. My client was most annoyed, but what could they do?

One of the first companies I hosted with had the world's worst customer service. But they were cheap. It was fine for the time, because I was building static HTML sites, and so most anything would do. But as Bill and I built more complicated things, like an osCommerce site, I had to start interacting with the staff. It frequently took a week for them to respond to my requests.  I finally decided to move when they decided to start upgrading servers over a period of about 6 weeks. Every other day, literally, all of my sites would be down, email down, and my clients would be screaming. After about 3 weeks of that, I started to move hosts to another company that cost twice as much...  and I'm still with them, and my sites have almost never been down.

Investigate carefully before picking a web host!!!