Thursday, July 9, 2009

Why is so Important to have a Reliable Web Hosting

By Ricardo d Argence

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 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 webhosting 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.

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.

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.

You can use some of the free web-based tools for monitoring uptime; these are very popular with website owners. Uptime is something everyone with a site is concerned about and these tools are becoming an increasingly popular part of the webmaster's toolkit.

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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