When selecting a hosting company for speed is it better to look at ping times or the amount of hops on a trace? I always thought the amount of hops was important but I've started seeing excellent ping times on hosts with 25 hops.
So whats better?

You are better looking at a combination of both. If a host has a large amount of hops then it has more potential failure points. I would also go by the ping times that doing a traceroute gives you as it takes in to account the speeds of the other hops etc.

Don't forget when you do a treaceroute that quite a few of the hops could be your ISP, I just did a trace from our server to my local PC (My PC is being funny so I can't do it from PC to server) and out of the 16 hops 4 of them were my ISP.

This isn't quite so simple as it looks.

When you do a tracert (or ping) from your system to a prospective host, you are seeing only a single route -- the one from you to the host. In most cases, only a very small percentage of visitors will actually reach your site on that host via that same routing.

To properly and thoroughly evaluate a host, you would do well to check performance from a large number of routes in order to better assess overall connectivity for a wide spectrum of potential visitors.

Fortunately, there are a number of sites from which you can do this. One good one might be: http://tracert.com/cgi-bin/trace.pl

The link above that was given is great to test out many
routes and compare with. You should find it very helpful.

Here's another...

http://www.traceroute.org/