how reliable is the Web hosting Provider?

A great website is useless if no one can get to it, so the reliability of your web hosting provider is vital. Having said that, you need to understand that absolutely no provider can promise that your site will be available
24 hours per day, 365 days per year. There is no such thing as 100 percent uptime.

It’s just a fact of operating web servers that they need to be maintained, and doing so might require going offline (downtime). Of course, providers try to keep this planned downtime to a minimum, and they try to schedule it for overnight or during other low-traffic times. What you want to know is that the web hosting provider is working to minimize unplanned downtime as well as drastic slowdowns in the loading time of your site.

These accidental outages or drops in speed will happen to any host at some point, so the real questions are these: How frequently do outages happen, how long do they last, and when do they happen? If your site is down accidentally for a couple of minutes, two or three times a year, even if it’s during prime traffic periods, that probably won’t affect you much. However, if the site is unavailable for 10 minutes once a week during peak visiting hours or very slow to load for a few hours each week in the same time frame, you’ll develop a bad reputation, not to mention lose revenue.

Are uptime guarantees of any value? Check the fi ne print to understand what kind or amount of downtime qualifies for the guarantee— most don’t include planned downtime. Then there’s the question of
compensation if the guarantee is broken. If you’re paying $9.95 per month for hosting, will a free month of service make up for your loss?

All other things being equal, if one host has an uptime guarantee and the other doesn’t, you might as well have the guarantee to give you at least something to point at during a dispute.


unplanned Downtime or slowdowns:
One of the most common causes of unplanned downtime or server slowdowns is poor security. Most sites are hosted on a shared server (multiple accounts on a single server), and if one of the other sites is using
an unsecured piece of soft ware, it can let in hackers who use up the server’s resources. If the hosting company isn’t on top of things or has a poor security system between hosting accounts, your site can be slowed down or knocked out.

Another common cause of server disruptions on shared servers is the attempt to squeeze too many sites onto one server without leaving some breathing room for unexpected bursts of traffic. Ask the hosting provider what its policy is for limiting sites on any one server.