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?

Reliable webhosting matters to your visitors, to the search engines and to you, if you like having peace of mind, that is.

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 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!

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.

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.

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 which can monitor uptime, something every webmaster should have. If you have a site, uptime matters. Being able to monitor this all-important performance benchmark for yourself instead of relying on the hosting company to provide it is valuable.

One good sign of a reliable webhost is that when they have planned downtime coming up or expect a service outage, they’ll notify their customers by email or place a notice on their site about the problem. Webhosting companies who don’t provide their customers with this important information hide it because they’re worried that their customers will decide to go with more reliable web hosting companies.