Reliable Web Hosting Buying Tips for Small Business Websites

"So You Want a Cheap Yet Reliable Web Hosting Service to Run Your Websites Profitably?"

Here are the sure-fire strategies you won't find anywhere else!

By Soon Chai

Why do some websites generate more income online?

One of the keys lies in the web hosting service that hosts the website.

If you use a web host that carries these 5 money-making elements, I promise you'll build and manage your websites fast and easy. Above all, grab more visitors and convert more sales online... without breaking a sweat!

1. Customer Support — 'Dead' or 'Alive'

First and foremost, a reliable web hosting service should arm with multiple avenues of support such as email, live chat and phone support operating 24 hours, 7 days a week throughout the year. This way you can quickly get a solution fast on the spot, even if you "scream" for help at 2 A.M.

Don't expect to get a web host that doesn't come with a "lick" of problem.

All, even the most established and reputable web hosts you'll experience some degree of problems with them. The real deal is how fast they respond to your problem and recover your issue. Of course, if a web host keeps giving you problems even though they're capable of solving them fast, then that's not the one you would want to go with. Definitely.

Shooting emails at them and waiting for their response can drive you nuts, especially when you need immediate assistance so that you can quickly recover and resume your business operation to minimize the loss in sales and other earnings.

They should stay at your beck and call anytime you need them — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Call them via phone or use their 'live' chat service if you feel more comfortable with it.

But some "dirty" companies pull the wools over people's eyes by claiming they provide customer support round the clockwork, which in fact is nothing short of email support, only.

Here's how to see through their scheme and quickly spot a reliable web host with genuine 'live' support. Very simple.

Scrutinize their home page and you should see both their phone number and live chat box somewhere there. The more confident they are, the more prominent they'll position those info — usually along the top.

Bear this in mind... very important — No live chat, no phone support... no buying from them. Period.

Some may offer phone support but no live chat support. This could pose a problem to those who are shy to speak, have a specific regional accent or having sore throat and not able to communicate their hosting issues over the phone. That's where the live chat support comes into play.

Tip: Make good use of the money back guarantee period, usually 30 days for most, or 45 days with this reliable web hosting service to intensively test out their customer support service. Seek their help whenever you need to. But be reasonable in your request. If they screw up and get on your nerves, you can still back out with a full refund.

One more, make sure they use in-house staff for customer support as in-house staffs are more dedicated in serving you. Outsourced support will make you foam at your mouth.

2. Good Control Panel Makes Your Day

Apart from eating and sleeping, the control panel is the next BIG thing you'll spend a lot of time with particularly when you're setting up and configuring your hosting account, managing, editing and transferring your files, customizing your site etc. It should furnish with lots of features and yet simple to use with quick response time.

Building your website will rip your hair out if you find hard to use the control panel and navigate around.

However, you can only know how good or bad the control panel is only after you purchase the service and start using it. Here's a tip, look for a web hosting company that runs with cPanel® which is the number one control panel in the web hosting industry!

The company should tell you on its home page if they use cPanel. Some web hosts will put up a demo on its control panel, and you can tell from there. Or the fastest way is to call or live chat with the customer support and ask them.

If it's cPanel®, then you can set your mind at ease because this control panel is very user-friendly — fast, organized and easy to operate. You'll love it!

3. The Need for Speed

How fast can the server display your website on screen?

When you get on a site that loads like tortoise, you'll definitely get pissed off and off you go — you won't hesitate to jump over to another site that loads faster, right?

Similarly, if your site loads slowly and you let your web visitors wait, you'll lose them faster than you blink your eyes. Let me show you.

For broadband users, any site that loads 8 seconds or more is a goner. They tend to be more impatient than non-broadband users. You won't like that either if you're using broadband.

Website Loading Speed	0 - 3 seconds	4 - 7 seconds	8 - 10 seconds	11 - 15 seconds
Loss of Prospects	0%	33%	78%	91%

Table 1 — How broadband visitors react to website loading

Imagine you spend every hard dollar and effort to get 1000 highly targeted, hot prospects on your website. Let's say you're capable of converting 15% of them into buyers. But the problem is... the server your site hosts with takes more than 8 seconds to load your site. What happens next?

Assuming all your prospects are running on broadband network, your 780 prospects would rather hop over to your competitor's site that loads faster, leaving only the 220 people whom for some reasons, stay put.

From 150 sales (15% of 1000 people) it plummets all the way down to the pitiful 33 sales (15% of 220 people). If one sale earns you $30, instead of making $4500, you make only $990. A loss of $3510. That's a drastic loss of 78% in sales revenue!

It only takes a few seconds to lose so much money! Can you imagine that?

Hence, you need a fast, reliable web hosting service that will host your website on a high-speed server.

But here's the kicker, you can't really ensure your website loads as fast on other computers as it does on your screen even though the web hosting service places your websites on a high-speed server. Why?

You could be using broadband, but according to the world Internet usage stats, about 1% of the entire online population is still using 56k (or lower) dial-up network. That's equivalent to about 16 million web surfers world-wide.

Unless you have a way to get them all to switch to broadband network, you can't do much to make your site appear almost instantly on their screen. The only way you can do is to get as fast a web hosting server at your end as possible to help compensate for their low network speed.

Another thing you must know is, for that 1% who can't afford broadband service, their waiting tolerance tends to go much higher — they're used to waiting 30 - 90 seconds for a website to load on their screens since they knew their computers run on slow network.

If you site takes more than 90 seconds to appear before their eyes, you risk losing them. But what if your web hosting server runs so freaking fast that it takes only about 20 seconds to load your site on their screen, you'll blow them out of water, so to speak.

In a nutshell, whether broadband or non-broadband users, your website must appear fast on their display. As such, don't compromise this speed factor when you choose / buy web hosting service. Your business can't survive without that.

Tip 1: If you're targeting local market, say, UK, you might like to go with your local web host, which in general will load your site faster on your local visitors' monitors due to proximity than if you were to host your site at US. But if you were targeting worldwide audience, generally, a US based web host would be the best option. The reliable ones can even appear super fast on several far locations beyond their US regions.

Tip 2: Did you know that Google also takes into account the loading speed of your website to determine its ranking position on Google's search results page, besides other ranking factors? The faster your site loads, the higher the positioning. And, the easier for Google users to spot your website. Of course, you get more traffic... for free!

4. Cap-less Bandwidth

In the context of web hosting, bandwidth means the amount of traffic allowed to visit a website. (This is very different from the more-common network bandwidth that measures the speed of data transfer in bits per sec.)

For example, if the web hosting service feeds you 100 MB bandwidth per month, in order for your visitors to view a 20 KB web page from your site, your website is allowed the max of 5000 visits per month. That's your traffic limit.

If you drive more than 5000 visitors in that month, your site will get suspended for that month until the next reset takes place on the following month.

For example, by March 25 you have already used up 100 MB, then your site will get suspended for the remaining 6 days in March. Once April commences, they'll reset your bandwidth back to 100 MB. And you can then start to drive another max 5000 visitors again. Get it?!

When you're just getting started, you may not hit the bandwidth limit so easily as you're probably still struggling with building traffic. But what if few months later when your online business begins to get off the ground and the number of your website visitors start to blow up like balloon, 100 MB per month would no longer suffice.

Let's say you can convert 5% sales on average — for every 100 people (normal prospects) you drive to your site, you can convert 5 of them into your buyers.

Imagine your website can attract 7000 visitors this month via Google, Yahoo, MSN, FaceBook, Twitter or others. But the problem is, when it hits the 5000 limit, it gets suspended. That means the remaining 2000 visitors will get shut out of your website.

Now imagine each sale earns you $30. If you're getting all 7000 visitors, your sales income will become $10,500 (5% × 7000 × $30). But because of the cap on your bandwidth, you can only make a max of $7500 (5% × 5000 × $30). You lost $3000!

How much would you have lost if 10,000 visitors were to get on your website in a month? (Hey, 10,000 visitors per month is not an exaggeration. When your business explodes, 100,000 is no dream either.)

Hence, you need a greater bandwidth — so huge that it can accommodate tons of traffic. 10GB? 100GB? Why not go for unlimited if there is one?

Unlimited (or unmetered) bandwidth means there's no cap on how much traffic you can drive. And you never have to fear you would exceed the limit anymore.

Only few reputable web hosting services come with that unlimited power. So, go for it. Choose unlimited bandwidth.

Note: Unlimited bandwidth and other unlimited resources usually tag along with some conditions. So, remember to read up their terms of service or policy or fine prints on their sites to make sure you don't inadvertently violate the rules and get your account suspended.

5. Uptime Guarantee — Don't Get Tricked!

Website uptime simply means the time during which your website remains up and running on the web.

Ideally, you would want your website uptime to keep at 100% because the longer your website stays 'live' on the web, the more money you'll make. Unfortunately, your website may go belly up due to network or server failure. Thus, it becomes impossible to keep your website in full operation all the time.

Some exceptionally powerful web hosts do come with a proven track record of achieving 100% uptime straight through 3 months. But it's nonetheless close to impossible to keep the servers at zero downtime throughout the year.

That's because hardware in servers are subject to aging effect while software programs are prone to virus attack. Even if there's absolutely no hardware or software defects, server may still require occasional reboot upon hardware / software upgrade or for maintenance reasons. These undeniable facts make no honest hosting service dare to guarantee 100% website uptime.

Big boys like Google and Yahoo can't even guarantee that, can anyone?

You might have come across some web hosts promising you 99.999% or even 100% uptime guarantee. Beware! They actually refer to network uptime guarantee only, NOT server uptime guarantee. What does it mean?

If their hosting network (comprises Local Area Network and Wide Area Network) breaks down, which in turn shuts down your website, then they'll refund you or compensate you with credits on your account. But if your website shuts down due to failure with their server which hosts your website, you don't receive any credit or refund from them. Let me explain further.

A network is made up of hundreds, if not thousands of servers and other peripherals.

Assuming your website server crashes. But one server failure does not impact the entire network operation at all as thousand other servers are still functioning. That means, so long as the network is still going on strong, you don't receive any compensation.

That's what they meant by network uptime guarantee — which, to say it bluntly, is nothing short of a marketing smoke screen.

It's very very difficult to have the whole network go down, unless a terrorist explosion takes place and blows up the entire network. Or a hundred-million-volt lightning strikes and tears down the complete network. Or a hurricane comes and sweeps up all the servers to the sky. Whatever.

That means, 100% network uptime guarantee... basically any web host can promise that since network failure is exceptionally rare under normal circumstances.

But maintaining good server uptime is different. Assuming you host your website on that server (which guarantees 99.9% uptime). And that server crashes due to system error or maintenance, software / hardware upgrade or virus attack that together accumulate more than 43.2 minutes in that month, you're in for a refund or credit compensation.

If you're not so techie about web hosting, 100% network uptime guarantee sounds very rock-solid and can suck you in very easily. But you're reading this article now, so you've become knowledgeable enough to guard yourself against suck trick.

Therefore, watch out for such companies that play around with words. A truly reliable web hosting service will state up front 99.9% uptime guarantee which refers to both network and server.

That means, regardless of whether it's network or server that results in your website failure of more than 43.2 accumulated minutes per month, they'll refund you or give you credits with compliance to their terms of service.

Note: That doesn't mean your website will go down 43 minutes every month. It's just a guarantee to you that should your site get shut down beyond that, you'll receive compensation in terms of refund or credits. In actual fact, your website may run at 100% uptime straight through several months particularly when you host your site with a robust web hosting service.

The lesser the downtime for your website, the more money you can make.

99.8% uptime guarantee is credible too. But not below that because that could mean the host doesn't come with adequate resources or expertise to maintain a stable hosting environment.

You Might Wonder...

Will web hosting service containing these 5 elements cost you a bomb?

Yes, it was. But not now. As more web hosting companies sprout up, they need to slash their prices yet providing even more resources and features than ever to stay competitive.

That's good news to you because now you can keep your costs down while hosting your online businesses with a reliable service that keeps making you money day and night, month in, month out, without fail.