Okay maybe the failing part in my topic is a bit of an exaggeration but really, I have learnt a serious lesson – the online world has unforeseen natural disasters just like the real world. You can make plans and set targets only to have them foiled by some unexpected event like your web hosting company disconnecting some of your high income generating niche site .

Yep! They did that to me once, I woke up in the morning excited about my Adsense income only to find that I had made far less than usual. You see, because of time differences globally, I tend to make a lot o money when it’s night time in my part of the world. The servers where my sites are hosted are in the US and we are 8 hours ahead of them. This means that I tend to get a lot of traffic from the US and hence more Adsense clicks from there.

So I was checking my Adsense income and could not see income from this one site that makes me a lot of money. I thought maybe it was a bad day. Day two, still not income then I got worried – funny I never stopped to think my site was down and never even bothered to check it. Day three, still no income then I decided to check. Indeed it was down and did not even know why – talk about 99% up time (this is what the web hosting companies will promise you in their sales letters). I guess I experienced the 1% of downtime.

To make matters worse, it took days to get my site up. The web hosting company, which is based in South Africa kept telling me stories like they themselves were not sure what happened. First it was about space – the said I had exceeded my quota. So I deleted some files and asked them to restore it, the next message was telling me they can’t because I am owing. I will not even go there. It turned out I was not owing – they hadn’t updated their records and because of the mistake I lost a lot of money with my site down. To make matters worse, when the Google bot visited my site, it didn’t find anything and so I was de-indexed and my site did not appear on search results for all the keywords I used to rank for.

I had often heard people talking about terrible support form web hosting companies but never took it seriously until it came and knocked at my door. Now I have learnt a lesson and wish to share it with you as you being your internet marketing journey. Do not be like me and wait for tragedy to strike, diversify your web hosting companies from the start and you will be glad you did.

Keep in mind that a web hosting company forms part of the basic foundation on which your online or internet marketing business is founded. Choosing a wrong web hosting company can cost you a lot of money – first through their poor support as I have discussed and secondly, through being penalized for using shared servers that are used by spammers. In fact a document I read from Google stated that they check if the servers that hosts a site are  blacklisted before they index the site. If the servers once hosted a spam site, then you are at a risk of not being indexed by the major search engines like Google.

Here are a few lessons to keep in mind as you try to find the best web hosting company:

• - Do not always look for a cheap hosting company: This will often give you grief and you will get exactly what you paid for – cheap service!
• - Do not throw all your niche sites in one basket: by basket I mean, do not host all your sites with one hosting company. It is often easier to manage sites under one account but what is more important is that your business should always be “open for business” i.e. always accessible online. In addition, having your sites hosted on different servers is good for “cross linking” between your sites as they do not share the same IP address. Of course Google employs other tactics to catch this “cross linking” but that is neither here or there in this article. I personally host at most 10 sites with one company then 10 with another and 10 with another etc. Management can get tedious but it is a small price to pay to ensure that my sites are never down at the same time.
• - Test the hosting companies before you commit yourself to one: shortlist them to 3 and send them similar messages at least 3 times. Enquiring about different things e.g. where are the servers based? What if I need to switch my hosting later, can you help me? You will notice the speed of responding, the nature of the response (automated or personal).
• - Visit some review sites to check out what other webmasters are saying about these companies.

Oh and I hate these “signatures” in the mails that say ” let us know if you need any further assistance” Gosh! They make me really mad. They are just not real period!

Please share your own experiences about hosting companies and you may provide a list of those you trust. Just mention domain names and not URLs on the comment section please.