If we’re a website owner, choosing a web host is one of the most important decisions we will make for our business. If we’re a reseller web host, that’s even more true. The services we can deliver will directly depend on the service our web host delivers. In effect, we’re going to be the middleman, so we’d better have someone backing us who will help us stay in business.

As a reseller web host, be looking for in a web host? In many cases, we should be looking for some of the same things our clients will be looking for. But we will find that we actually have less flexibility than they do, because we have a lot more riding on our web host.

As a reseller web host, our website and our ability to provide uptime is our business, period. And our potential customers will figure, by extension, if they have any problems getting through to our website, that we cannot provide good web hosting services.

Our customers will start complaining to us about their websites not working properly. And we, in turn, need to contact our web host.

We might not be the only one operating on a thin financial margin. Our web host might be using IDE instead of SCSI drives, or overloading its servers with too many accounts.

Our prospective web host is reliable before this happens? One way to judge is by whether they offer a guarantee. Some hosts will guarantee 99 percent uptime, and they back that up by refunding all or part of our monthly fee if they fall below that.

Another way to tell whether our prospective web host is reliable is to visit its support forums. Browse around for a while and get a feel for what kinds of complaints the company receives. We will also want to check out other forums.