by Ricardo d Argence

Reliable web hosts aren’t as easy to find as you might imagine. There is considerable competition out there with an increasing amount of web hosts, and resellers who all claim to give the consumer upwards of 99% uptime.

Reliable web hosting is the most important consideration for any website. Reliable hosting is what makes the difference between having repeat visitors and visitors who never get to see your site in the first place, let alone come back for another visit.

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; and not just to your visitors – it also gives you peace of mind.

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.

If your website is for business, then you absolutely need a reliable webhost. You need hosting which not only promises uptime of at least 99.9% (which almost all hosts do) but actually delivers on this promise. It is certainly possible to have uptime better than 99.9% – the technology is there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

About the Author:
Founder and actual CEO, Ricardo d’Argence has been in the field for almost 20 years. Alojate.com is now one of the biggest web hosting providers in Mexico, offering a range of services for all business needs. Servidores dedicados, Search Engine Optimization, factura electronica, web hosting & registro de dominios.

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Filed under: e commerce

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