: How can I choose a reliable dedicated or semi dedicated Windows hosting? Possible Duplicate: How to find web hosting that meets my requirements? How to find your hosting company

Posted in: #DedicatedHosting #LookingForHosting #Vps #WebHosting

Possible Duplicate:
How to find web hosting that meets my requirements?

How to find your hosting company 101 for dummies

There's a TL;DR at the end.

Long version

I've been asked by a friend who understands nothing about information technology to help him from being scammed.

This person runs a family-size retail company through an e-commerce, developed and hosted by the same web agency.

He no longer trusts this web agency, and wants to get away from them; the first step he wants to perform is to move the e-commerce from the agency's servers to an external hosting, and here is where I've been involved.

I'm a web developer with some background in networking an system administration, and I understand the difference between VPSes, dedicated servers and managed/unmanaged, but I never went through the burden of choosing a (semi) dedicated hosting for a site you live off.

I don't necessarily have to give him a (or more than one) name, but at least I need to give him a range of prices and kinds of services; things like maintenance of the web site or the machine is not and such are not part of the discussion, at the moment.

My "analysis" should include a "minimum" and a "maximum" price, and the services these prices offers, both for VPS and dedicated server solutions.

I've been searching around for a couple of time and found some hosting companies, I also tried to look around for reviews and comments about them but it's a daunting task, and I got more confused then when I started; I've found everything and its opposite, who should I trust?

If it matters, his e-commerce is spec'ed like this:

Classic ASP
SQL Server 2000
A couple of IIS and ASP plug-ins
Around 250 MiB of space
Runs on a 6 MiB line with other ~30 sites
I do not know his average daily traffic, but definitely it's not Yahoo or Facebook

Short version

I'm here, fellow webmasters, to hear your opinion:

Are there on the net some reliable hosting companies comparison sites? What I found so far looks quite amateurish, and doesn't provide mush info besides a ranking.
Are there some reliable sites where I can find reliable reviews of the hosting companies? What I found so far is forums filled by differently technical flaming users and their signal-to-noise ratio is awful.
How can I tell a good hosting company from a bad one? What should I look for? Things like "unlimited", "unmetered" and such things are the basics, what's the next step?
Remember, this question is not about which hosting company is "right", but how can I find a reliable one (I'll evaluate which are "right" after, when comparing their offers).

P.s. I deliberately omitted the link to the sites I found to avoid bias, if they should be included I'll gladly add them.