For online business owners, making sure your internet storefront is always open is extremely important. If you are paying large amounts of money for advertisements, having a blank landing page is certainly not a good way to cash in on your investments.

In order to decrease the chances that your website goes down, there are many external website monitoring services available. The benefits of joining these programs are quite apparent. For starters, by being subscribed to website monitoring service allows you to track your web host's performance. How sure are you that your website is still functional at three in the morning when you are fast asleep? Web site monitoring services such as WebService Guard monitor your website 24/7 and keep reports that you can check later. 

Additionally, these services offer multiple ways of alarming you in the instance your website does become unavailable. That gives you the opportunity to make the necessary connections, or phone calls, to get your website functional again as soon as possible.

The services are quite inexpensive and worth the investment. If you uncertain that website monitoring is something you need, take the WebService Guard free trial and find out for sure. 

I get a lot of questions regarding how to tell a good web host from a bad one. While it isn't a hard thing to do, it can be for someone new to the website world. In my opinion, here is what you should look for.

1. Customer Support

How often is the web host available to help you? In today's world, good customer care is essential, and it should be! If you pay for a service you should be able to expect the best there is to offer. I have heard stories of terrible customer service and how it effects projects. Don't cut corners in the beginning of your project by selecting a host that won't be there when you need them to be. I suggest getting a host with 24/7 live support.

2. Market Share

While I am completely for supporting small businesses (being one ourselves), there are some things that should be left to larger companies with more resources. I believe hosting is one of those things. Part of the reason Design Advances does not offer hosting is because I don't feel we have the resources to offer a high class hosting operation. There is strength in numbers. Choose a host that has a lot of happy clients already.

3. Add-on Domains

This is a feature that I feel is often overlooked. Many people purchase a hosting account expecting to be able to host unlimited websites on it only to find out later that they are only allowed one domain. This is where add-on domains come in. Add-on domains allow you to add a completely new domains to your existing hosting account. Some web hosts allow 5 add-on domains while the really good ones, such as HostGator, allow unlimited add-on domains. Pick a host that allows you to expand with more domains.

4. cPanel

Do yourself a HUGE favor and pick a host that utilizes cPanel. cPanel has become the internet's standard web hosting administration panel. It is not hard to learn and it is by far the most user friendly control panel you will come accross. 

Of course there are other things to consider such as bandwidth and disk space, e-mail accounts, etc. when choosing a web host, but I think those are pretty straight forward. If you are running into problems in the bandwidth and space department, it is time you upgrade to a dedicated server. Having your website shut down temporarily because of exceeding bandwidth is not a good way to be successful online.