Hosting plans are written to be compared on price and nothing else. Here is what to look at instead — it takes about five minutes per host and it will save you a migration.
1. The renewal price
The advertised figure is frequently a first-term promotional rate. Find the renewal price before you compare anything. A plan at $2.99 that renews at $11.99 is not cheaper than one at $5.99 that renews at $5.99.
2. What 'unlimited' means
Unlimited storage and bandwidth are constrained by something — usually an inode limit, a CPU quota, or an acceptable use policy that lets the host define 'normal' after the fact. A plan that states 40 GB and 3 TB is telling you more than one that states unlimited.
3. Backup retention and who can restore
'Daily backups' with a 24-hour retention window is close to useless. Check how many days are kept, whether they live off-server, and whether you can restore yourself or have to open a ticket and wait.
4. CPU and memory
Shared hosting performance is decided by CPU and memory limits far more than by disk size. If a host does not publish them, that is itself informative.
5. The control panel
cPanel is standard, which means your backups are portable and any developer you hire already knows it. A proprietary panel is a migration cost you pay later.
6. Where support actually is
Check the response time commitment, and whether support is staffed at the hours you work. '24/7' on a website and a first reply nine hours later are different things.
7. The refund window
Thirty days is standard. Anything shorter than fourteen suggests a host expecting you to notice a problem after the window closes.