Don't fall for those dirt-cheap plans - they're bait to lock you into a laggy, oversold server that can't handle a basic WordPress site without choking. Uptime claims are often straight-up BS, 99.9% means nothing if their hardware is ancient and their datacenter is a glorified shed.

Support? Good luck getting a human who isn't reading off a script while your site's down. I grill providers on their infrastructure - redundant setups, SSDs, and load balancing - or it's a hard pass. Scalability and backups better not be an upsell scam either.