Host Reliability As a Basic Criteria For Selecting A Host

If price is your only criteria for selecting a host, you can stop reading.

You should have criteria other than price. A low-cost hosting company that has frequent outages will cost you more than you could ever hope to save by using them.

A host's reliability or "uptime" is extremely important. After all you sign up with a host to use their services and if their services are unavailable, you're not getting what you paid for. This is true, even if you didn't pay much.

Before picking a host, inspect it's reliability percentages. No host will have 100 percent uptime. Even the very best hosts are unlikely to promise better than 99.999 percent uptime. The host's promise of uptime is only part of the equation. You need to know the actual reliability statistics. Avoid any host that is less than 95 percent.