The reliability of your site is critical and the more important your site is to your business the more vital it will become that your site is live and operational 24 hours a day. The ‘availability’ of your site is known as ‘uptime’ and the hosting industry standard is to guarantee 99% uptime. It is possible to get a higher uptime guarantee but it will cost more. As a rule do not accept less than 99%.
Coupled with uptime is bandwidth, this is the amount of data that can be transmitted and received by an Internet connection. The higher the bandwidth, the quicker the user will be able to access your web pages. Bandwidth is often not an issue but if you offer lots of downloads or images on your site you may reach the ISPs bandwidth limit and you will need to pay fees for the additional bandwidth used. Make sure you check and compare these costs if this might be an issue.
Taking uptime and bandwidth together will give you a good feeling for the network connectivity offered by your ISP. Speed can be everything on the Internet; so finding the fastest connection possible can be quite important. High-grade bandwidth is the key as is using less than 50% of available bandwidth. To find the official rating of your ISP visit http://www.webperf.net/?id=availability.
Uptime and bandwidth are guaranteed against the reliability of the ISPs Internet connection but the quality of your hosting server is also a potential risk. The term 'redundancy' refers to an ISP having spare servers and hard-drives for if a server fails (failover). You should ask what failover procedures the ISP has. Also check the server processor speed and that you get enough disk-space to support the size of your website.
Security is becoming ever-more important. The ISP should use as standard: firewalls, anti-virus software, authentication and access controls to help protect you from hackers, viruses, fraud and denial-of-service attacks.
Contact the technical support team to get answers to these questions. It is common for ISPs to only offer email support – especially out-of-office hours. Be aware of how long they take to respond as it is a good indication of how responsive they will be when a problem occurs. Some ISPs also offer phone support – even at weekends. If you turnover £000’s every weekend you’ll want someone on hand to resolve issues immediately. Also ask how long the company has been trading as an indicator of reliability.