What do customers look for when buying shared hosting plan?

After reading through many threads on this topic in a vast majority of forums, here’s a list of items that customers look for and expect from their current and future shared hosting accounts.

1. Good support – This item tops the list. There is no second thought about it. Every customer wants a world-class customer support and great quality of service from the hosting company.
2. Well priced packages – Customers are not looking for dirt cheap web hosting plans. They are looking for hosting plans that are balanced between price and features.
3. Reliable network – Customers who are technical, tend to look at the infrastructure of the hosting company they want to go with. They want a working redundant network architecture at the data center where the servers of the hosting company are running.
4. Knowledgeable staff – It’s very important to have people in customer support department who are technically good and can resolve issues of the customers. Even if they can not, they must have enough knowledge to troubleshoot and take the problem to the next level of resolution.
5. Less downtime – The magical word is uptime. Everybody is looking for higher uptime.
6. Tenure of the business – Not everyone, but people like me look at this aspect of the hosting company. I would be very keen to know for how long a hosting company has been in business.
7. Money back guarantee – Some people look for money back policy that most of the hosting companies have. These are otherwise also called as trial accounts where in you pay for the first month and if not satisfied, your money is refunded.