Even given the large number of web hosting companies out there, it’s a lot harder to find a reliable web host than you may have thought. The competition is intense and there are plenty of hosting companies and resellers, all claiming to offer 99% or greater uptime.
For any website, reliable web hosting is incredibly important. It can mean the difference between a frequently returning visitor and one who doesn’t bother at all.
Pages often returned as not available can also impact your rating with today’s ultra-clever search engines who are also in a race of their own to beat their own competition (other search engines!) after all, a customer returns to good service.
Reliable web hosting matters; and not just to your visitors - it also gives you peace of mind.
Let’s say that you want to add a few new pages to your site but every time you try to upload your new content, you find that your webhost’s servers are down. It’s a pretty frustrating situation - and it’s not one that you have to live with. It’s no longer the early 90’s when frequent outages were the norm.
You expect better from your web host and more importantly, consumers demand that websites be reliable. There are web based businesses who have failed to thrive all because they chose the wrong web hosting company to work with. As soon as you know you’ve got a problem with your web host, you need to take action.
If your website is strictly for your personal use and it doesn’t matter too much to you if anyone else can access it, then you might not be too concerned with reliable webhosting. However, it’s a critical factor for every other site out there.
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.
Say your webhost was current providing you with 20% downtime (80% uptime) this could in effect mean you are losing up to 20% of potential customers, who cannot view your site due to this downtime.
The more often your site is down, the more money you lose. It’s just the plain truth. Your webhosting company is supposed to provide you with reliable infrastructure to help you make money, not lose it.
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 which can monitor uptime, something every webmaster should have. If you have a site, uptime matters. Being able to monitor this all-important performance benchmark for yourself instead of relying on the hosting company to provide it is valuable.
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.
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