The Most Reliable Web Hosting Providers For 2023

Regardless of where you operate from, you're sure to have customers, clients, or visitors logging in to or opening up your page at any time of the day. When they do so, you need to be confident that your site is up and running. If it happens to be down, they may go elsewhere, or they may mentally blacklist your site as a website not worth spending the time to visit.

Reliable web hosts are those that ensure that the websites that they host are always up, with a high degree of predictability and reliability. Reliable web hosts outdo everyone else in one key performance area: being up and running, online, and functioning smoothly, all the time (or at least with less downtime than the next best alternative).

Website downtime can seriously damage your brand or business. If you do not have a reliable host, you may find your web page down or unavailable more often than you like, even if the downtime or site compromise is only for a few minutes. This can result in missed visits from the potentially thousands of people online at any point in time searching for something related to your line of work.

You may also miss out on a chance lead or a quick sale if someone who was ready to buy or to take the plunge drops in to your site only to find it down for whatever reason. When we talk about trusted and reliable hosting plans, we don't mean hosting that never goes down for maintenance, but sites that don't crash either. Reliable hosting is important for avoiding these issues.

The short answer is no, not usually, at least not at the level that you would expect from a host that brands itself as 'reliable'. There are many well-known, respected, and reliable hosting services that have the infrastructure and support processes for providing absolutely top-notch uptime and reliability, but their plans are not free. Providing reliability and robust services is not easy, after all!

When we talk about free hosts, the majority of them make money off ads, or by upselling services once they've locked in users. The majority of trustworthy web hosts usually offer 99.9% uptime, but they charge for their services. So if you find a service that claims to be reliable at zero cost, it would be surprising if they are really able to provide a high level of services at such a price.

One bad customer experience is enough to know that a certain host is not always 100% on your side. While we can measure ping times with a speed test, or compare high vs low-price hosting plans, reliability and trust are much harder to gauge. Comparisons of server specs are straightforward, but knowing which hosts follow through on commitments and which ones do not is much trickier.

The simple answer is therefore no, you cannot trust every web host. The best way to really tell whether or not a host can be trusted is to check customer reviews, dig into publicly available data, and combine your findings to pinpoint which hosts are reliable and provide customer satisfaction beyond their competitors from those that have fancy plans but do not follow through on promises.

'Helpful customer support' is only true if the host has overwhelmingly positive customer ratings. Similarly, 'super-fast servers' is meaningless without a benchmark. Remember that with hosting services, as is true with any purchase of any type, you need to read the fine print and really understand what you are being promised vs what the average level of service that you can expect is.

Make sure to go for a web host that is known to follow through on its commitments to clients, and one that delivers the specs and resources promised in their promoted hosting plans. Otherwise, you'll have trouble down the road with unhelpful customer support if you ever run into issues such as registration or certificate errors, or if you want to migrate your domain or move to another plan.