You probably already aware that there is a large number of hosting services available to choose from. For someone who has never hosted a website before, finding good web hosting can be very daunting and challenging. This article goes through 4 criteria which you should use when choosing a service to use.

1. Downtime

If you don’t know what downtime is, it refers to the average amount of time your server is down over a month or an entire year. When the server hosting your website is down, this effectively means that your website is no longer online and visitors cannot visit your site. An optimal level of downtime is 0.1% over a month and 1% over an entire year. Anything more than that is regarded as unacceptable and you should discontinue using that web hosting service.

If you want to find out the downtime of a web hosting service, your best option is to contact someone you know who has that web hosting service and ask them what the average downtime is. In addition, you can look through online forums for such information.

2. Price

The wide range of prices for hosting is probably what confuses newbies the most, especially when the features of 2 packages are similar. I have to admit that there are many hosting providers who charge far more than they should because they want to be seen as more “high quality” and want to take advantage of the newbies on the market. This is certainly not a feature of good web hosting. After more than 2 years in Internet marketing, I have to say that price is not a sign of quality when it comes to hosting. There are plenty of cheap web hosting providers that give you more than you need at a low price.

3. Support

When it comes to hosting websites, you will almost always come across technical issues. As a result, you must choose a hosting service which will give you the fastest support so that any problems are fixed as quickly as possible. Depending on the size of your business, a technical issue could mean losses of hundreds if not thousands of dollars. The best support mechanism that you should look out for is live chat service which has a short waiting time.

4. Reputation

By far, the best indicator of good web hosting is the reputation of the provider. If someone you know is recommending one to you or if you find a lot of people raving about the service on online forums, then you know that it must a good one. This is the most reliable criteria and can quickly make it easier for you to find a decent web hosting service.

What I Recommend

Over the last 2 years, I’ve only used 1 hosting service and that has been Hostgator. I was introduced to this by one of my Internet marketing mentors when I just got started online and haven’t looked back since. It complies with all 4 criteria above and most importantly it has a great reputation online. I highly recommend it if you want good web hosting today.

For those Internet business company the availability of their website is a major concern. The cost of downtime for web businesses hosting can amounts to up $10,000 an hour. And this does not include the losses which are caused by missed opportunities and sales. Losses in reputation and credibility these businesses suffer more because eventual downtime is even harder to quantify.

Many of today's web hosting providers offer 99% uptime for their web servers. If you have already chosen one or if you are going to use one with such a high uptime should you be concerned on the whole matter anyway?
Let's see how much 99% uptime means. For a 30 days month you have 720 hours totally. 99% of it is 712.8 hours. Are you comfortable with your web site taking a day off every month? And this if 99% uptime happens. Can your hosting company back up its uptime promises with real facts? How can you tell that?

For companies who make business online it may seem a good idea to move their Internet operations in-house. They develop theirself's infrastructure, hire specialized technician,only to keep their business online. The cost of such an enterprise would seem rather high for the ones seasoned in the Internet based business. Why? Because of the high cost implied: around $20,000 a year of windows hosting package, without even thinking of the logistical burden.
The best way ensure your business is online is to have monitoring reports available on your web host's uptime.

For companies or individuals having their web hosting providers monitored by a third party is a guarantee not only that their money is well spent, but also, an most importantly, that their Internet business is up and running.

Having their services monitored by a third party is beneficial even for the web hosting providers. That is very serious hosting providers. Offering reports of their uptime monitored by a third-party software and placing links to them on their website is bound to boost the confidence of their existing customers also the one of the prospecting customers in the quality of service that host is providing for its customers.