Why Your Online Reputation is Very Important for Your Business?

As a business that operates online, your reputation is vitally important to help you gain customers and excel above the competition. However, what many business owners neglect is their online presence especially if it is negative. There are millions of people worldwide that do a quick search of a business before they give it a try, and this can be as simple as just typing the business name into Google.

This will give them a quick overview of the business and a few reviews before they are ready to commit to this service. Although if they do a quick search and are presented with a ton of negative comments and warnings this will quickly turn away customers that were just about to give you business. This can be something as little as one bad review.

This is why web reputation management is extremely important, especially now as more people have access to smartphones as they can quickly do the check on-the-go. Make sure your business is shown in the best light possible and if you do have any bass press, no matter how trivial, it is pushed out of sight on the search engines so your customers will not see it. In turn we will also help publicize the good reviews and praise that you have.

Make sure that you are not damaging your business with a problem that can easily be solved. If you have any bad press or bad reviews make sure you get them buried and out of sight immediately and secure the business that you need.

Why uptime is so important?

Damage of downtime may vary depending which kind of website you have. There is really not so big trouble, when small business website, which has 4-5 pages, goes down for twenty minutes now and then. It would be more troublesome with bigger business websites, which have thousands of visitors each day. Troubles with bigger website means more problems to both visitors and to the website owner. It is even worse with e-commerce sites, which are generating constant revenues - there is even possible to calculate lost revenue for each minute! 

However, when website is down, it creates bad publicity for both small and big companies - visitors see the error message, are disappointing and leaving to somewhere else. There is great risk that they never come back.  That is why you should avoid web site hosting providers, which servers are not running properly.

The Reason Why Your Site is Down

To understand the nature of web hosting uptime better, we need to look little bit closer what may be most probable reasons causing downtime. Web hosting service consists many elements, there are servers hardware, operating systems, web server software, database components, network connections and even more tiny details, which may all fail and cause shorter or longer downtime. Best web hosting providers have usually duplicated most fragile hardware parts, like hard disks and power supply units so when one fails, another is used automatically without any downtime. Hardware becomes also more durable over time. New technology, for example SSD storage devices are offering much more reliable data storing than old fashioned hard disks. However, servers are breaking down sometimes and this is definitely making difference for overall web hosting uptime. What is important from viewpoint of choosing right web hosting provider, is that those companies, which have newer servers and more duplicated parts, have better uptime statistics than those which are using old, weared and teared servers.

There may be also software failures and network components breaking down. Good web hosting providers have also usable solutions for handling software bugs and duplicating network connections. As a rule, companies investing more to new hardware and software, hiring competent staff members, are also able to show better server uptimes.  

First thing in understanding your web hosting service provider would be to figure out how long has it been in web hosting business, what kind of servers they have, how they have systems duplicated, who is maintaining servers and what are their existing clients tell about them.

Check Your Uptime Result

We talked that web hosting providers may not always calculate uptime correctly, so you get most accurate uptime number by just monitoring website by yourself. Since most of us don't enjoy monitoring website 24 hours a day, there are simple software solutions available by neutral, third party companies. Most of these uptime monitoring services don't need any additional coding on your site, but they just ping your domain, use http page header and record monitored results to their database. Most of these uptime monitoring services don't load more components but http header of your website, so regular pinging doesn't affect visitors statistics, which are calculated with using on-page scripts. 

Depending on response code the uptime monitoring service gets from your web server, they may even send you an alert either by e-mail or SMS, so you will be notified when your website is down and when it gets up again.

Conclusion

Web hosting uptime is important parameter, which describes how reliable is your web hosting service provider and how often are their servers down. The higher is uptime percentage, for example 99,99% the better it is. However you should also understand that sometimes it may be important shut servers down for short time to carry routineous maintenance tasks. Best web hosting providers are planning well ahead, sending you notification and scheduling web servers maintenance to the nighttime, when it is at least disrupting.

If you are just planning to start with new web project and need good web hosting for website, we would recommend you to find best webhosting solution for your business.