I agree with a few of you here. From my expieriance on this -

1 - Make sure you choose an agent that will actually talk to you! My agent wont even do that still! Even after requesting a new one.
2 - Foget about that list of hosting providers, I went though 3 of them and had nothing but problems from the start. I finally ended up with Joombyte who bent over backwards to help make my site work.
3 - Ask for references, somthing you can go to yourself and check out on thier servers. Most of them see more will not tell you they have 50 other sites on that server and 30 of them are very busy.