Website Marketing Skills For Small Businesses

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, 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.

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.

When is it critical to have one? It’s important anyway � very important unless you have a website you aren’t too concerned about people seeing; today’s new search engine methods mean that reports are made each time a URL is inaccessible and this can lead to a drop in search engine rankings after so long.

Business oriented sites simply cannot survive without reliable web hosting. While all of the hosting companies promise 99% and uptime, you should look for hosting which promises (and more importantly, delivers) 99.9% or better uptime. It’s possible and there are hosts who can do this. The technology is there, but not every host can provide it.

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 lower your uptime, the more money you could be losing – it’s just that simple. Your webhost is supposed to help your business make, not 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.

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.