Reliable and affordable small business web hosting almost sounds like an oxymoron. It’s as if reliable and affordable can’t be in the same sentence when talking about web site hosting, but that’s what many small businesses search for and some happen to find one while others thought they did and end up being disappointed.

Reliable small business web site hosting has to have powerful servers with good connection and bandwidth that are capable of handling a spike in traffic in case your company makes the news or goes viral. It has to have at least 99.9% uptime so you can be confident that your web site is accessible whenever a customer visits. The .1% downtime is for maintenance and that’s understandable. You also want 24/7 customer support because there will be questions and problems that you’ll have down the road at odd hours that need to be addressed immediately.

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When it comes to cost, many businesses are tempted to go with the cheapest hosting without realizing that they may be sacrificing reliability. They’ll even consider free hosting packages and risk tarnishing their company’s image. Free hosting is not reliable and your site can be down any moment and that can affect your customers’ impression on you. It’s better to pay that $5 a month and have more uptime than taking that kind of risk if you take your business and customers seriously. In small business web hosting, you usually get what you paid for.

At $5 a month, that’s a really cheap price, but you better do your research and find out if the small business web hosting company you’re looking at is any good. They usually offer better prices if you pay in advance for a year or two, but getting locked down for that long won’t allow you to move if you’re not satisfied. Instead, you can test out their service for a couple of months before you hand over the big money for long term.

Beware of review sites for small business web hosting services because most are just affiliate sites promoting for commission. You can ask around or search in forums and even the forums of the hosting companies you’re looking at to see how many and what kinds of complaints and comments there are.

Finding reliable hosting is not hard if price is not an issue, and neither is finding an affordable one if reliability is not an issue. However, finding a reliable and affordable small business web site hosting service is a little harder, but is not impossible. You just have to look really hard, but seek and you shall find.