What kinds of guarantees do you look for in a host?

1. Uptime Guarantee (99.9% or better)
2. Money Back Guarantee (minimum 30 days)
3. Privacy Guarantee (Stated in their Privacy Policy)
4. Security Guarantee (SSL installed, secure servers, ect..)
5. Quality Guarantee (customer service,reliability, ect..)

That's my list.

In addition to the wonderful list made by HostLeet, I'd want a guarantee that clients will be notified in advance about:

(a) any maintenance work; scheduled downtime;
(b) any change in management (company sold/acquired);

Great lists - adding to scheduled downtime - that should be far enough in advance to allow your clients to prepare for the outage.

That one's unlikely to be announced early. Typically the buyer wants the news to be broken when things are already under their control and avoid customers fleeing like a spooked flock of chickens.

I can hear their wings flapping! Of course, for example - if a highly respected provider offering substantially significant upgrades in features buys out Joe's corner shack - I think they'd be laying golden eggs. Churn is inevitable, but from my own experience, this can be minimized by running both brand names, then phasing out the old as clients got used to invoices from the new owners.

Runing multiple brands is the way that we did our aquisitions in years past. We notify the new customers that we have taken over their accoutns and that they can continue to operate at the levels they are, or they can move to our servers with better package features and rates (in most cases).

Alerting people of a potential sale is not usually something that is done in the hosting industry (see chicken reference above ), but definitely once aquired, a notice should be sent to users either from the old management passing the torch, or the new management alerting to the change.

At the very least there'd likely be some policy changes even on the old host to reflect the standards of the new host.

I look for almost the same thing.

yup..that's the basic what we need to be guaranteed.

Great topic! When I'm looking for a web hosting company I look for the following:

1. SLA / Uptime
2. Terms & Conditions
3. Acceptable Use Policy
4. CGI Abuse Policy
5. SPAM Policy

Note: If they don't have a policy for it then I wouldn't go with that company. You shouldn't have to ask what their policy is it should already be provided on their website.

In relation to what was said above about management changes/buyouts I think a lot of hosts dont inform customers at all about it and the new owner just continues to run multiple brands. By informing the clients about a management change it might scare them off and the thing the buyer has paid for is the customers. So I guess a guarantee to do with receiving notice about management changes would be good. But with most of these guarantees exactly how "guaranteed" are they? I would assume there are some out there just making claims but not delivering.

the prove and delivering guarantee is all clients wants!
don't you think that's true?

Well said. I agree with HostLeet.

Of course web hosting service providers do guarantee that but at the same time no one can guarantee that because of act of God

For me...

1. Uptime Guarantee (99.9% up)
2. Customer service
3. Money Back Guarantee (minimum 15 days)