Reliability - You will not be able to control when Googlebot and other search engine spiders visit your site. If they visit while your site is down, the aforementioned timedout-queries_total variable will tick upwards, which isn’t good. Often webmasters are actually unaware of their site downtimes. Many such outages only last a matter of minutes and can happen at 3 o’clock on a Sunday morning, so neither you nor your customers may ever notice them. But Google will notice – and make its own algorithmic note.

Once you have your site up and running, there are a number of sitemonitoring tools you can purchase or use for free on the web. One is the Kane Internet Seer web-monitoring tool, which sends you a regular email containing site-uptime data. Sign up at www.internetseer.com/home. As you are still at the host-selection stage, you can compare the latest uptime data across a range of providers at the Netcraft site (www.netcraft.com).

Look for providers that enjoy a consistent position in the top 10 over many months (rather than those that come and go). There are many providers that enjoy zero outages during any given month (which should be a minimum prerequisite for the serious webmaster). Even the very best, however, will have some failed requests. Again, as for speed, when you track back top-ranked performers to their pricing packages, you may be disappointed to find that they are more expensive than you were hoping to pay. This is not surprising:
Excellent performance (or so-called “high availability”) requires significant infrastructure investment. The cost must be recovered from customers. If you are going to economize on anything, I would recommend you do not do this with your hosting provider, As with speed, reliability is not an area to scrimp on.

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