A Completed Guide to Web Hosting Reliability

Nowadays, it is quite common for anybody to have his own business online. And as we all know the first necessary step is to pick out a reliable web server for your website. You should pay special attention to the reliability of the web hosting service. Following I will explain why.

The importance of reliability
Professional web master should know the fact that reliability is the key to the success of a website, especially one that deal with online business transactions or other mission-critical functions. Actually, whether your website is hosted on a reliable server or not can directly affect your website visitors. Imagine, how pity it would be if a visitor come to your website for only one time and never come back again because your website is down while he is looking for something he needs. Your website should be attractive enough for he to become your frequent visitor, unfortunately, you give up the chance if you invest your money on poor hosting provider. Well, if you do not want to have frequent website failures, data loss and sale loss, then the easiest way is to go for a reliable web hosting solution.

Some aspects of web hosting reliability
As you have noticed that an unreliable web server will drive away your visitors, then you will need some attributes to judge whether a particular hosting is of high quality or not. Then those following parameters are for your reference: customer support level, server configuration restrictions, web site speed and hardware reliability. If all of these are satisfying you, then you will be able to have a good sleep over the nights.

A.Customer support level
On the hosting marketplace, most of hosting providers claim that they are able to offer excellent customer support. However, not all the companies are in that position. From my personal point of view, it is not wise to believe in web hosting reviews nowadays, as most of them are paid by hosting company and will not give you a true picture about the real level of a particular company. However, you can acquire it by asking some pre-sales questions. By asking these questions, you can not only get the answer to anything you want to know, additionally, you will be able to understand the level of quality customer support that is provided by the technical support staff. By asking questions about their power supply, the specifications of their servers, information about network connection and data center, you should know whether they are responsive and professional enough.

B.Hardware Reliability
A good hosting provider will never sacrifice hardware quality for profits because they should know that low quality hardware will be equal to suicide themselves. Therefore, they will be willing to invest a fair amount of money in hardware and keep the server up to date regularly. Generally speaking, they will need some scheduled downtime for hardware replacements and maintenance. It is a smart idea to know some information about scheduled maintenance before you sign up. Base on my own experience, you can judge whether a particular hosting company is a larger company with their own data center or a pretty small company who simply lease servers from the large company and resell it to you via checking out the hardware they have.

C.Server Configuration Restrictions
I put this in the third place because most inexperienced webmasters will not need much server configuration options, however, some experienced webmaster would like to have more control over your website. You are strongly recommended to pick out one from a couple of most popular control panel, CPanel and Plesk so that you will be able to perform most configuration changes and run your website successfully. You will be allowed to do following task within Cpanel and Plesk:

•Manage email account and set up webmail client
•Manage file with built-in file manager
•Analysis website traffic with stats software, like, AWStats
•Manage domain and subdomain
•Manage your MySQL database
•PHPMyAdmin web manager
•More…

D.Server response time
You must have this kind of online experience: clicking on a particular search result and waiting for several seconds, you are still not accessing the website then you turn to the next option. These days, web users expect more and more from internet so if your website can not provide instant accessibility, they will not be coming back to your site again. Well, we can say that your website speed will directly affect your website traffic, your earning ability and finally you potential revenue. In fact, your server response time is the key factor to your website speed. When a visitor clicks on a link to your site, firstly, the address of the site is required to be looked up in the DNS records, and then it will be able to know the location of your server. Next, the request is sent to your server. Therefore, your server must responsive enough and handle the request in a quick way. To ensure this you should make sure that the CPU (which determines the “start-to-load” speed) of your server is not overloaded. In addition, you should make sure that you are offered with enough resource so that the loading speed of your website will not be affected due to limited bandwidth or other resource.

Obtain a reliable web hosting solution
If a hosting company cannot provide you with a reliable service, it can be very difficult for you to success online. 99.9% uptime guarantee has become industry standard, therefore you should never try one with a lower percentage uptime promise. Some companies are offering alternative infrastructures to enhance server reliability. Your web host should be your partner that helps you succeed with a website or online business rather than simply a supplier.