How do I select a provider?
Choose a provider who you feel you can rely on and communicate with. Assess the response you get to your initial enquiry and how efficiently and courteously your communications are dealt with. If a provider is anything less than 100% efficient, drop them - however cheap or tempting the services.
You can make comparisons between what is on offer from different providers in these areas:
a) Disk space (Mb)
b) Number of POP accounts
c) Bandwidth - you need high speed and connective reliability.
d) Access features
e) Spam tagging
f) Virus checks
g) Backup frequency
h) Firewall robustness
...and another vital thing - don't go with less than 100% uptime guarantee.