Thinking about having a website for your existing business? Or do you want to start a new project and looking for a website host? Or let me guess, your existing web hosting company is the reason you are reading this article because you just can’t hear that - server is down due to DoS (denial of service) attack, we are going through an upgrade process, we are experiencing a hardware failure or (my personal favorite) your IP was blocked on our server, excuses one more time. Trust me! The customer support staff of these bad quality hosting companies is highly skilled in excuses.

Your hosting provider plays a great role in your online ventures. You do not want your website to be down when a customer is looking for it. You also won’t find it very pleasant when you recently updated your website with new contents and a few hours later your host had to install the backup created yesterday in order to fix some problem and all your new contents and changes are now gone. These are quite common problems among small business web hosting providers but you can avoid them by signing up with a reliable host.

So the question is, what should you look for in a small business web hosting company? There are many technical things that you want to look for and we will discuss them later but first things first, make sure they have a top notch customer service. Yes you need the space and reliability and all that, but trust me if the customer service is not good, the company is most likely to let you down on everything else, especially reliability. The best way to find that out is through searching for reviews of your prospective small business web site hosting company.

Uptime is one of the most important things that you should look at, make sure your small business web hosting comes with a guaranteed 99.5% or higher uptime. Bandwidth is also very critical. It is the amount of bytes transferred when a visitor browses through your site. How much bandwidth you would need, really depends on the nature of your web site. If you are anticipating a huge amount of traffic you should probably look for higher bandwidth. But don’t fall for “unrestricted bandwidth” trap. The host that guarantees “unlimited” bandwidth is not being completely honest with you because it’s never limitless, they pay for bandwidth usage and basically cannot provide unrestricted bandwidth for no extra cost. Some other important feature that you should get with your small business website hosting includes FTP access, email, autoresponder, mail forwarding, control panel etc.

But remember, before you proceed to obtain a small company website hosting service, you ought to always look for reviews from trusted providers. Do not worry about the cost too much, because it probably will be the lowest cost your business has to bear.