To find a hosting company you need to do some research.  You need to go to your search engine to find a list of hosting companies.  There are literally hundreds of them.  Also you can put in hosting company review sites just to see how they compare to each other.

I use Hostgator.com.  I personally think it is an outstanding company with great customer service.  I do feel word of mouth is a great way to find your hosting company.  You can look in PC Trade magazines for help.

As far as what to look for in a hosting company, you need as much as you can get.  Bandwidth is how much data their servers can send and receive.  Disk space is important because you want as much as you can get.  A small site would need maybe up to five hundred megabites.  A blog, on the other hand, would use more than that over time.  Each blog post is considered a web page.

The amount of uptime is another important item to know about.  Uptime is how much time their servers are working properly in a twenty four hour day.  If their servers go down you do not have a website.

Also, what kind of scripting language are you going to use?  For example, HTML5 and PHP are just a few.

If you are going to do blogging, you are going to need a database language and the server must be able to provide it.  For example MYSQL database is probably the most popular.

Also, if you plan on being an ecommerce site you will need a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate.  You need that so you can safely send customer data over your site when the customer buys something form you.  So you want to make sure your hosting company has that capability.

Finally I would want a company that provides support of twenty four hours a day/ seven days a week, and I would settle for no less.

I would choose a hosting company and look at their hosting packages online and then I would call them to see how they treat me when I ask questions.  If you want questions to ask to your search engine and search what should I be concerned about when buying a hosting service.