Where can I go to learn of the good characteristics of a hosting provider?

I don't even know enough to know what good hosting is and is not. I have used only Namecheap hosting and now Arvixe.
Arvixe seems to be OK but there customer service is either immediately or never. They just took so long to restore a backup (all my images were messed up from a WP 3.9 update) that the server overwrote the backup that was good. Now I only have a copy of a broken site.
They had at least 36 hours and possibly 48 before the normal server update.
Is this normal?
I have shared…
Where can I go to learn of the good characteristics of a hosting provider?

See original post by lucabrasi