For me part of it is the datacenter. I do prefer certain datacenters to begin with, but that is me. I have had excellent luck with softlayer by far. I also prefer as I have mentioned before dual xeon or 8 core minimums. A host that limits accounts or keeps a tight handle on them. One that does not pack them in there like most do. 100 accounts on one server will blow away one with 500, or one that allows unlimited addons and some joe blow ads tons of them.

Only a few that I know of that really see more limits them.

Secondly last time I checked host for web and many other hosts tend to set things up with apache module dso. This is fast and boonex seems to like this or follow this. It's alright if the server is all yours but still has a number of security issues. Suphp or a cgi/fast-cgi setup will be much more secure. If you are talking vps or dedicated then obviously you can make the change. But for shared hosting find one that has minimum suphp.

I have been with or have helped others with so many hosts over 10+ years. It all depends on how serious you are and how much you really want to promote your site and drive traffic to it. A little site with little traffic will do fine with most cheap hosts. A serious site with heavy promotion and heavy traffic will demand much more eventually. Only a few of the cheapies will be able to handle it if thats the case. But only a very small percent get up into that category. Rms is iffy in my opinion too. Unless you have a very active site you aren't going to use it that much. It is just pushed as a necessidy which for most sites is rarely used, and/or very little.

Only 1 shared host that I have had good luck with and they are not on the boonex recommended list.