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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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