Mecanicien

Posts Tagged ‘web hosting’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.