All webmasters desire reliable web hosting because it's the lifeblood of their web sites. How about you? Are you looking for reliable web hosting at affordable prices? Knowing how to get reliable web hosting is imperative especially for small businesses that rely on a steady flow of traffic for publicity, leads and sales. It constantly amazing me how many businesses and webmasters put so much time in building a website, but spend very little time researching reliable web hosting providers. By the way, would you recognize a reliable web hosting provider when you saw one? Well, we’ve put together the following reliable web hosting tips to help you avoid some of the same mistakes I made when looking for a reliable shared web hosting package. Reliable web hosting means the provider should have an up time guarantee of over 99.9%. Bottom line-what good is having a website if people can’t find it when they want to?. A reliable web hosting company will not have its servers breaking down every time you turn around. Reliable web hosting means the company will not take your site offline (even for a few minutes) before giving you fair warning. For example, with many cheap shared web hosting providers, the company will take your site offline without warning if you use a certain percentage of CPU power on the shared server. This actually happened to me with what I thought was a reliable web hosting provider. One day my traffic spiked (a good thing), but my shared web hosting company kept taking my site down every twenty minutes or so for 5 minutes at a clip. Can you imagine all the traffic and potential customers I missed? Ouch! Part of the problem was that I really didn’t know how to choose a reliable web host. Therefore, before settling in on one reliable web hosting provider, we recommend that you carefully read the Terms of Service (TOS) on its site. If they don’t have a TOS on their site, just keep shopping. If you’re still not satisfied, contact one of the sales reps to go over the TOS. Reliable web hosting will have 24/7 tech support that actually knows what they are doing. Many so called reliable web hosting businesses boast “around the clock” support. But availability does not equal reliability. Especially for non tech types, it’s important to have folks on the other end of the line that are familiar with your CPanel, blogging software, web design or other issues related to your site. Additionally, if the potential reliable web hosting provider has well visited forum with categorized advice, consider this a plus. Reliable Web Hosting Providers will have happy customers. Perhaps the most powerful reliable web hosting tip, we recommend doing a “google” search of that discount web hosting you looking into, and see what others are saying about it. Overall, finding a reliable web hosting provider is essential for building web site traffic. Following the above reliable web hosting tips will hopefully help you do so. David Butler, the author of this article, is a Christian small businessman and has several web sites: Christian Dating Service PLUS!, and Affordable Web Hosting 4U.