DON'T BE FOOLED BY THE CHILDREN BEHIND A MONITOR!
So, this is a question I get asked a lot. why should I pay 10$+ for hosting per month, or why should I pay for a host which isn't cheap. The answer is simple, the cheap hosts are only after one thing, your money. Where as hosts which offer a wide range of pricing tend to be there for you. Such as; GoDaddy, Hostinger etc.
As I have said in multiple threads here, web hosts which offer you a free domain and hosting for 2$ or something are not viable option if you are wanting to grow - commonly those which are featured on websites such as this are possibly 15 years old, and yes they are under age to be running a web hosting service or any kind of business. While it is fine if you are just using it for educational purposes, and not offering a service, there are technicalities to everything. Make sure to read their Terms of Service, even copy some of it into Google and see what pops up. If the Terms are copied from somewhere it should pop up. That would need to be an instant sign to turn your back on this provider.
Now when it gets down to what size hosting you need or specifics. You need to consider growth, especially with forums. Commonly if you are running a wordpress portfolio site or a blog you would need to go for a mid range hosting experience, this would allow you to have good storage. For myself, using GoDaddy's medium plan it works perfectly well with my Designer Portfolio, I upload a lot of images every month and it can get to the stage of if I was on the lower plan I could be running out of file storage. I also have another site based on my plan which is a test site primarily for testing, to make sure nothing goes wrong on my live site. GoDaddy ( I sound like a sales man for GoDaddy at the moment lol!) offer super performance and super support, I honestly haven't seen any provider provide such support of quality. Of course you could also use a local provider (Apache or such) to host a site locally, only accessible to yourself - this is free.
Going back to why you should pay for the premium hosting, The people who set up and run services on retailer plans aren't going to be there for you. They will most likely use pre-answered topics and pre-written answers to respond to your tickets for support, it is unlikely they are going to know how to help you to the maximum potential. I have experienced serveral hosts ignore my tickets where I ask for a complex task, they will not reply - instant deterrent. But don't get me wrong, there are some people in this world that do know how to help and if you're lucky you can find these.
When I faced an issue with my previous site before now. I was with Fusionrax - a hoster which was up for a good several months, everything seemed to be alright, their servers wiped theirselves a few times and they then just disappeared saying they sold their business to another. But in reality it just turned out they changed their business name, which they then started to close down their site etc. Then a few months after this had occurred they made a thread here on Webflake which was basically providing the exact same service under another new name. I made a extremely long post about it and I wont go into that much detail here, but soon enough they again closed their site again.
Going into the financial side of things, it will be very much cheaper to go with a premium hosting plan than it would jumping from hosters which aren't actual businesses. you can pay 100$ for premium hosting for what? a year? two years? - then have the time you never would have if you were jumping from hosters every 4 months or so. Just think about it if you didn't need to set up your site after a wipe or have to download a back up and re upload it somewhere else, you would be better off, you would have hours to develop your site and develop what you offer.
DDoS Protection, do you need this? If you are a big company or site then yes. If there are hosting services which are offering you DDoS Protection, it is simple. If it is 5$ or 10$ it is false protection, real protection costs more and likely hood they wont offer DDoS Protection of shared hosting anyway. And no, premium hosting wont be cheap either with DDoS Protection, possibly in the 100's region.
I will continue adding to this, but this is just a start !