Millions have made the Internet their sole source of income by selling products and services through online stores. Many individuals use a hosting company to host a complete online store, or simply to hold images for items auctioned online. Others sell advertising on their sites.

For those who make a living off their sites, their income-how much they will make-is literally determined by their hosting company. When a site is down, customers can not view, much less purchase, items through the site. Customers might not be able to contact the seller at all. If a popular site depends on advertising, what happens when the site is down?

No page views, no clicks, no income.

To make the issue of downtime more serious, there are long-term risks in addition to the short-term risks just described. If your site experiences frequent downtime, clients might "give up" on your site. This means a permanent reduction in your income-either through selling products and services, or advertising. These are clients that might never return-or worse, patronize your competitors. There will have to be double the effort to first make up for lost clients, and then make a net gain. The income that a webmaster will receive-both short and long-term-is directly related to the performance of the web host.

Today, downtime is not the only risk caused by a host.

As the Internet has grown in popularity, the number of malicious hackers has grown as well. When you place a site online, you are inviting your site to be compromised. Customers will not appreciate going to your site, only to find "0wN3d bY 1337 Kl0WnZ" prominently displayed on your home page. These are customers that will probably never return-if your site is not safe, why should they entrust you with their credit card and personal information?

I have been in the web hosting business for close to ten years. During that time, I have seen numerous hosting companies rise, but particularly, fall.

Some fail dramatically and with much fanfare, others simply "pull the plug" without any warning and literally disappear into thin air.

Not a day goes by without someone experiencing a horrible situation from a hosting company.

A webmaster's site is down. Contacting the web host is impossible-their telephone line has been disconnected, or their e-mail gets bounced. Hours pass with no improvement or status update. Perhaps the site will be brought back online, but perhaps it will not.

There are numerous threads at WebHostingTalk and other forums about this same situation-with more being created every day.

Again, these hosting clients are people that have made the Internet their sole source of income. These are people that have families that depend on the income they receive from the Internet. When their site is down or compromised, the flow of income shuts off completely.

The livelihood of webmasters and their families is in the hands of the web hosting company. What an immense responsibility!

Yet, many hosting companies collect their fees, and let the servers languish, causing frequent downtime and attacks against the hosted sites.

If you, the reader, have a site as a source of income, please thoroughly investigate a web host. DO NOT CHOOSE A WEB HOST BASED ON PRICE ALONE.

I can not stress this enough: DO NOT CHOOSE A WEB HOST BASED ON PRICE ALONE!

Instead, look at the QUALITY of service offered:

· How long has the hosting company been in business?
· Is the hosting company profitable? How long have they been profitable?
· Are they incorporated? In what state/province/country are they incorporated? Check with the appropriate government office to verify the company is indeed incorporated as they claim.
· What kind of bandwidth do they provide? What upstream providers do they use?
· Thoroughly investigate the upstream provider companies as well as the host itself.
· Does the host offer 24/7 live support, not just 24/7 "monitoring"?
· Does the host apply security patches to all software?
· Are daily backups made of server software as well as client sites?
· Is a firewall installed, and are unusual accesses logged?
· Is correspondence with the hosting company ALWAYS prompt, courteous, helpful, and free of spelling or grammatical errors?

If you, as a site owner, do not spend a small amount of time investigating a hosting company, you are risking both long-term and short-term interruptions in your income!

Please thoroughly inspect a hosting company, and do not look at the price alone!

Now, as a company that pioneered the $1.00 hosting plan, this advice may sound completely inconsistent.

However, we realize that we host thousands of income-generating sites. Downtime not only interrupts our income, but the income of our clients as well.

This is why we offer 24/7 support. We want to prevent interruptions, but if they occur, we want them to be as minimal as possible-for our clients benefit!
Internet For All has been in business for close to ten years. We host thousands of sites. We are simply not going to "pull the plug" one day and vanish. We realize the importance of each clients site, and want each client to be as successful as possible!