Web hosts, who are supposed to be your close business partners, and whom you expect to be prepared to do virtually anything to help lift your business to success, can also be the biggest stumbling block and the worst enemy in your search for high traffic and web site success. Here’s how.

1)The old game of now your site is available and now it is not, greatly affects traffic to your web site. This unreliability can be caused by many factors. It can be the web host using sub standard low quality servers. It could even be the web host overselling their services and signing up many more accounts than their available resources can support.

2)Some sites are pretty basic and should load quickly and yet they still take ages. Most browsers (and your potential clients) will not wait but will close the slow window and move on somewhere else. These slow speeds may in some cases be caused by the same reasons as I’ve listed in ‘b’ above.

3)Lack of proper support services means that web sites can often go through long downtime periods where a lot of traffic can be lost, literally forever. Some web hosts are nothing more than a part-time basement setup with no proper customer service arrangements. It is not uncommon to call your web host and get an answering machine. Some web hosting services have even outsourced the technical and customer service functions. One entrepreneur even complained recently that when they called the technical support department of a certain host company, the phone was answered alright – but by a non-English speaking technician.