Choosing a web hosting company can be bewildering. You type ‘web hosting’ in a search engine and you are presented with literally millions of web sites. Some are actual web hosting sites but most are probably ‘review’ sites and other ‘best web hosting companies’ type of listings. There are so many of these review / directory sites because many web hosting companies pay a commission to the site owner if they get a sale from someone coming from that site.

This does not mean that you should disregard review sites. They can be very helpful.

Firstly, there are definitely some genuine review sites out there that are not driven by commission.

Secondly, most (but certainly not all) review site owners do not list companies with bad reputations. Consistently bad web hosting companies quickly get a reputation on the net among webmasters; and nothing makes someone disregard a web hosting review site more, than seeing a known ‘problem’ company with a high rating. Review site owners need credibility to continue making commissions !

Thirdly, web hosting companies that can afford to pay high commissions to review sites usually must be doing well to afford to pay those commissions. Cheap web hosting companies; or ones that are losing a lot of customers, typically cannot pay those commissions since they are pretty high due to all the competition in the marketplace.

I will explain how simple it is to see if a web hosting company has a good or bad reputation among those ‘in the know’:

First, look at a bunch of review sites and note down the companies which are consistently in the top 10 and offer the features you want and are in your price range. Then bring up Google or any other search engine and type in the name of the first web hosting provider on your list as well as the word ‘forums’. This will bring up any mentions of that web hosting company among internet message boards; where unlike review sites, most information is just people’s honest opinions. You will typically find messages posted on webmaster and other specialty sites where the users usually know what they are talking about. Although finding positive posts about the particular web hosting company you are interested in is the best outcome - its also true that no news is good news. If people are not posting messages about that web hosting company…then at least you know they don’t have a bad rep. Compared to happy customers posting positive messages, people are much more likely to post negative messages if they are disappointed in the service they received; since pissed off people like to vent !

Read through a bunch of these messages, and you’ll get a good idea of the reputation the web hosting company has. Do that for all the companies on your list; and you can feel confident that you are in a position to pick a web hosting company that really does have a good reputation.

About the Author

Doug Bane is owner and webmaster of the Top 5 Low Cost Web Hosting Companies, Leading Ecommerce Web Hosting Companies and the Top 6 Small Business Web Hosting Companies.

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When you begin to look for a company to host your website, other than the amount of space and bandwidth that is offered, a company will usually promote their web hosting uptime. Most web hosting companies offer an uptime guarantee to promote how well their service is.

Web hosting uptime is a measurement of the time a computer server has been running, the longer the web hosting uptime the better the service (usually). Uptime is important to not only web hosting companies, but to any person or company that has a website, because if a website is down it could hurt a personal company’s reputation as well as the reputation of the web hosting uptime guarantee. Web hosting companies strive for a 99.9% uptime, which means that there would be less then 2 minutes of downtime a day.

Factors that impact a web hosting uptime are sometime unavoidable, but many companies strive to prevent downtime. Downtime can be classified in three ways: planned downtime which is caused when a server is updated or upgraded, semi-planned downtime which is caused when software companies find a security breach and a patch must be put into place, and the worst is unplanned downtime which can be caused by an overloaded server, a software/hardware malfunction, or malicious software.

Uptime guarantees made by web hosting companies are based off of past information. Web hosting uptime can be monitored and maintained a few ways. There are services that provide 24/7 monitoring. Large web hosting companies have their own departments that monitor their servers. A loss in web hosting uptime can be prevented by having a redundant server to fall back on incase the primary server goes down. For a planned single server change this method may be practical for a larger company, but the costs implied for an additional server in a smaller company or providing this for multiple servers in larger companies can be impractical. Unplanned downtime would also keep this method from working well.

Some niceties that many websites provide is a friendly downtime message that will still allow the user know that the site is only temporarily down. Larger web hosting companies are able to provide a quicker return to normalcy to maintain their uptime guarantee, because they have staff readily available to respond to a downtime error quickly. Smaller companies may experience a longer downtime.

For consumers, researching web hosting uptime can prevent a package from being purchased from a web host that has a lot of downtime. There are websites that track a company’s web hosting uptime and provide reviews on the company freely for review. Other places to look for information are on forums either provided by the web hosting company or on web hosting review forums.

If your website does experience downtime you can contact the technical support or customer service department to see when your site will be restored. Understand that no web hosting company can have a 100% uptime guarantee. If your website experiences too much downtime switching to a different company with a higher and better web hosting uptime may be your only option.

Does your web require good server uptime? Sign up for Marble Host, a web hosting company which offers 99.9% uptime hosting.

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Web Hosting is one of the revolutionary breakthroughs that has been brought to us by the advent of this age of cyber technology. Now you can learn, play, interact, make friends, draw, and compose music on the net. Therefore, one can understand the significance of the cyber technology that has become a crucial and important part of our daily lives. With the passage of time, there has been major growth regarding the number of websites, i.e. esoteric subject or business oriented pages arranged in a clear lucid, logical and sequential way. Therefore, the jobs and work that were dependant upon the physical presence of the customer in an office or a service centre have now been reduced to a mere push of a button - web sites.

However, the actual meaning of web hosting is creating a web site and making it available on the internet. It sounds simple, however, it requires the application of certain computer languages through which the actual intended texts and pictorial representations are written and drawn on the page respectively. Web hosting can be done, only after the proposed page is ready, the page may or may not be hosted at a particular price. Websites with multiple numbers of pages or websites which are business oriented ones are hosted at a particular range of prices. Obviously, for that there has to be a registered domain name to run the related website. However, one has to be very keen and careful on choosing of the optimization potentials of the website.

There are a number of providers who offer discounts on the price for web hosting. In the age of the world wide web, availing discount offers on web hosting can prove to be a lucrative. If you want to showcase and open an online shop for your products and services, availing discounts on domain prices can be an immense beneficial proposition.

Discount Web Hosting provides detailed information on Discount Web Hosting, Discount Business Web Hosting, Discount Linux Web Hosting, Discount eCommerce Web Hosting and more. Discount Web Hosting is affiliated with Reliable Low Cost Web Hosting.

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