Why a Web Hosting Uptime Guarantee is Non-Negotiable

A reliable web host is essential for the smooth running of your online business, and with luck, your site’s reliability should be an issue that stays firmly in the background and doesn’t cause you any headaches. However, you can’t rely on every host treating this requirement as seriously as they should, and this means you should always choose a provider who has a high uptime guarantee to help set your mind at rest. What problems can frequent downtime cause a business website?

Wasted Advertising Spend

If you’re paying for traffic through advertising, then you need your hosting to be up at all times. If your website is down when your ad is clicked, not only do you lose the budget spent during the downtime, but you’ve probably lost the chance of that visitor ever responding when they next see one of your ads.

Search Engine Ranking Issues

Website reliability and responsiveness is a huge factor in modern SEO. If your site is regularly down or responds slowly owing to hosting problems, you can fully expect your rankings to take a serious hit over time.

Indexing Loss

Worse still, if your site is repeatedly down, you may see it all but banished from search engine indexes completely. Slightly less dramatically, large but unreliable sites will see their indexing ratio diminished if engines consider frequent, deep crawling a waste of their resources.

Losing Organic Traffic to Competition

On any search results page, your competition is only ever a click away. If your site is down when a searcher tries to reach it, they’ll immediately go elsewhere – probably never to return.

Increased Support Issues

Lastly, if you have a significant customer base, you can expect a flood of calls to your support department every time your site fails to respond. At best, this is a waste of valuable staff resources, and at worst the hassle and annoyance will start to drive your loyal visitors away.

No web host can realistically offer a 100% uptime guarantee – mistakes and unforeseen events will always happen.
However, if your business website is at all important to your commercial success, you should choose a host who can guarantee a high-level uptime and will have stated procedures for monitoring service availability and compensating you if there’s a problem. Considering the huge amount of effort that’s been put into developing your site and building traffic to it, you can’t let an unreliable web host sabotage your hard work. Carry on!