While the number of web hosting companies continues to grow, it’s still not necessarily easy to find a reliable web host. There’s a lot of competition for your business, with web hosts and resellers alike all trying to lure you with low prices and promises of uptime 99% or greater.

For any website which intends to make a successful go of it, reliable web hosting is the most important thing to look for. The difference between reliable hosting and hosting which isn’t is literally the difference between having visitors return and having visitors come once to see the site out of service, never to come back again.

If your site is frequently unavailable, this can also negatively affect your site’s ranking with the search engines. Search engines rank sites in order of relevance to a given topic and by their perceived importance to users – and after all, how valuable of a resource can a website be if it’s always out of service? 

Reliable web hosting matters to your visitors, to the search engines and to you, if you like having peace of mind, that is.

Suppose you’re trying to add new content to your site and every time you try to upload, you find that your webhost is down. Pretty frustrating, isn’t it? It certainly is and since this isn’t 1994 anymore, there’s no reason you need to put up with web hosting service which doesn’t give you the reliable performance you need.

You have every right to expect better performance from your web host and of course, visitors will expect your site to be there when they try to visit. There has been more than one online business which has failed because of unreliable web hosting. Once you see problems with your hosting services, do something about it – the longer you wait, the more business you could be losing!

When is it critical to have one? It’s important anyway very important unless you have a website you aren’t too concerned about people seeing; today’s new search engine methods mean that reports are made each time a URL is inaccessible and this can lead to a drop in search engine rankings after so long.

Business oriented sites simply cannot survive without reliable web hosting. While all of the hosting companies promise 99% and uptime, you should look for hosting which promises (and more importantly, delivers) 99.9% or better uptime. It’s possible and there are hosts who can do this. The technology is there, but not every host can provide it.

Let’s say that your current webhost’s real uptime (not the uptime they promise) is 85%. This means that you could be losing as much as 15% of new business due to visitors being unable to access your site.

This is affecting your earning ability, thus losing you potential revenue. Anyone you employ to help your business, in this case the webhost should not help you LOSE money!

So how can you tell if a webhost is reliable? The short answer is you really can’t until you try their service for yourself. However, there are a few things you can do to help you assess if they may be reliable enough to trust with your website.

There are free tools now on the internet which help you monitor up and downtime, and these are becoming more and more popular in the race to be top of the search engines. More and more people are realizing the importance of server uptime, and these tools can become an invaluable resource if your webhost isn’t communicating too well with you.

One of the best signs of a reliable webhosting company is that they will notify customers of any planned downtime or when they expect problems with their service by email and/or a notice on their website. If a webhosting company won’t give you this information, it means that they know their service isn’t good enough to keep their customers from going elsewhere.

FHTM

Categories : Lora's Posts