MCSE Training UK

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, reliable web hosting is incredibly important. It can mean the difference between a frequently returning visitor and one who doesn’t bother at all.

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.

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.

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!

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.

If you are with a decent webhost then the likelihood is, you’ll either receive an email advising you of planned downtime, or there will be a portal on the webhosts website advising of any problems. Webhosts who hide this sort of information do so for a reason, and that is because they�re frightened you’ll go elsewhere.