A web host account is like the storefront of your online business. If your web host goes down, your website becomes accessible and visitors can't make any purchases from you. Imagine being the owner of a web business that brings in thousands of dollars in sales on a daily basis. How would you feel if your web host goes down?

In reality, all hosting companies do experience brief periods of downtime. Many factors can cause servers to go down. For example, if you are hosting your site on a shared server, someone abusing the server may cause the server to go down temporarily. Then there are other factors that are beyond anyone's control. A power outage or an earthquake may damage the hardware and cables, causing servers to go offline for some time.

Fortunately, uncontrollable factors are few and such situations rarely happen. When down time occurs, the only people who can get the servers up are the engineers. That is why it is very important to sign up with a hosting company with qualified and professional IT engineers. When something goes wrong, they are able to pinpoint the error quickly and perform rectification works. That will eliminate the duration of the outage.

The best hosting companies even go as far as developing their own software solutions to prevent similar problems from affecting the servers. Many years ago, servers can be severely affected due to hacker attackers. These hackers use a method known as Denial of Service (DOS) to cripple the server. This is done by sending endless packets of data to the server until the server slows down to a crawl. The server is still online, but is unable to process requests that are sent by legitimate users.

Today, the majority of the hosting companies are well aware of this threat and they have developed and installed sophisticated software that will detect such attacks.

When you go with a hosting company, you want to be sure that you are in safe hands. If the engineers fail to respond promptly when servers go down, you end up feeling frustrated because you just can't get anything down when your sites are all offline.

Therefore, be sure to go read reviews before making a buying decision. Don't just go with the company with the lowest pricing. Sometimes, smaller companies attempt to lure customers by lowering their prices to outrageous levels. In a few months time, they find themselves hurting because they just can't support the vast number of customers on their hands at that ridiculously low price. In other words, the pricing strategy is faulty in the first place, and this could hurt you.

Don't let that happen to you. Find out what other customers are experiencing and if possible, send a few emails to their support department. See if they can come back with professional and intelligent responses. The industry has become so competitive now that it's actually common to receive replies in less than 24 hours.

Reliability is the number one factor you are looking for here.