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.

A site which is often unavailable also suffers in terms of search engine rankings. The major search engines use relevance to the search term as well as the popularity of sites to determine their rank. If your site is often out of service, it’s obviously not going to be perceived as a popular destination by search engines – how could it be if it’s always down?

Why is it important to have a reliable web hosting? Your peace of mind is one reason that springs to mind straightaway.

Imagine trying to build your website, to find that every time you go to upload new content or make any changes you can�t, because the service is down. It becomes tedious and frustrating and we are no longer in the early 1990’s were that sort of thing was experienced daily.

Consumers are more demanding and won’t keep coming back to a website that offers less than perfect service. Whole businesses have been lost because of the same thing, and it’s this sort of problem which needs addressing the moment you realize you have it.

Unless your website is one which is made solely for your own entertainment and you don’t really care about anyone else seeing it, reliable web hosting is critical. You can lose business and lose your place in the search engine rankings if your site is regularly unavailable when the search engines try to index its pages.

Running a business through your website though makes it critical to have a reliable webhost. You need at least 99.9% uptime, this may seem excessive to you, but in today’s modern technology it is perfectly possible to find web hosting businesses that can manage and in some cases even exceed this percentage.

Suppose that your current webhosting company is giving you a real uptime of about 80%. This is an extreme example, but if your site is only up 80% of the time, you could be losing as much as 20% of your potential business. That’s just not acceptable for any business.

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!

How can you tell if you’ll get reliable web hosting from a given company? You can’t tell for sure until you try their service yourself. There are, however a couple of things you can do to get a better idea.

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.

If you are with a decent webhost then the likelihood is, you’ll either receive an email advising you of planned downtime, or there will be a portal on the webhosts website advising of any problems. Webhosts who hide this sort of information do so for a reason, and that is because they�re frightened you’ll go elsewhere.

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