The web host is an important business partner for any web business. The host is the caretaker of the web files, and access to the website depends on the reliability of the host. Therefore, it is important that a website owner choose his web host carefully. The tips in this article will provide some guidance in how you should select your host.

Reliable customer service is extremely important to the reliability of your website. What if you suddenly find that your website is offline? That means your customers cannot get to your business. The first thing you should do is to contact your web host’s tech support department. There is no knowing when your website will have problems, so they service should be available to you, 24 hours a day, for urgent matters. Email support is not enough in the case because email response can be slow. Live support through the phone or online chat would be ideal.

See if you can sign up for a no-obligation trial of the hosting service. During this time, you can test the quality of their customer support. Call them up and see how quickly they can response. Send them an email with a non-urgent questions and see if they can give you a helpful response within one business day. The level of customer sets the high-quality web hosts apart from the others. So, use this test to weed out hosts that do not meet your customer service expectations.

All websites need to have their domain names registered. Some people let their web host register it for them. It is actually better if you register your domain on your own. It is easy to do by just doing it online at a domain registrar’s website. The reason is that if you ever decide to switch to another web host because you are displeased with the service, you can make a clean break from them. If you relied on them to register your domain, you will have to rely on them to renew when the time comes. But if you have severed your hosting relationship, they may not be attentive to the renewal and they may allow your domain to expire, causing you lots of problems. Therefore, register your domain for more control over it. Then you can choose your web host freely.

Find out what the uptime percentage is of your web host. Server maintenance is expected for all web servers, but your host should minimize the down time. Find out when they usually do maintenance, and what their uptime statistics are.

Choose a reputable host who can accommodate your business growth. If you are just starting out, you may not need a lot of storage space or bandwidth. However, once your business takes off, your traffic will increase, and that means more storage and bandwidth requirements.

If you pay attention to these details, you can find a good web host. Make a careful choice not to avoid problems in the long-term.