A reliable web hosting service is highly crucial, to ensure that visitors can view your website round-the-clock. For it to be up and online always, there shouldn’t be any error and this depends upon the extent to which your web hosting service provider is reliable. In simple words, the level of success of an online business is heavily dependent upon the web host’s reliability.
It may be daunting for a business to find a reliable web host in the flock of innumerable web hosting providers in the market today. And, likewise, it can be equally tough to stand out of the lot, and make your mark as a host in this ultra-competitive hosting industry. So, here are few useful tips that can help you assess the reliability of a web hosting service provider.
UP-TIME
It is crucial to find out the up-time guarantee stated by the provider. A reliable web hosting company should be able to assure 99.9% up-time and there should not be any kind of delay in accessing the site. A reliable host ensures that the site is always up and running on the web. Researches indicate that a website that is visited often and is relied upon for e-commerce businesses can lose several million if it is down even for a short period of say even 30 minutes.
PAGE-LOAD TIME
It is important in measuring the time taken by the website to load and the loading time is less only if access is quick. No business would want their website to load slowly, though it may also happen due to excess usage of flash, heavy images, and bad programming.
DEALING WITH EXCESS USAGE
If a customer happens to exceed the storage space/bandwidth allocated in a particular web hosting package, the provider should send out notification and charge extra fees, but not disconnect the services and put the site offline as this can hamper sales. No one would want their site visitors to see the message that the bandwidth limit has been exceeded when they try accessing their site. Though most hosting providers ensure this does not happen, it is also essential to make sure that these additional charges are reasonable too!
CHECK THE COMPANY CERTIFICATIONS
This is the major label, which assures quality. A few factors that can help measure this effectiveness, if you are already subscribed to a web host, are ensuring that site operation is stable, hosting provider regularly takes data backups, and finally, the security software on the server is updated with the latest upgrades quite frequently.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
It is also a very important factor to be considered. If a website goes down, the owner must be able to get in touch with the hosting provider instantly and get a quick fix. Settling for anything less than 24×7 customer service support can be a rather foolish move!
These handy tips are sure to help a person narrow down upon a highly reliable web hosting provider for all business web hosting needs. Remember that a website cannot be successful without a reliable web host.
So, in case you’re a hosting provider, you should certainly make it a point to overcome these problems and deliver what’s needed. In case you’re a customer, you should certainly take these aspects into consideration.