If you’re really trying to make money online, having a dependable webhost is so important.

I’ve been through a couple of different hosts.

First I had a friend give me free hosting! Yup, 100% free. He had a reseller account.

But I never felt right about it when I noticed that the type of account said “Educational.” He was teaching a course at a college so he qualified for an educational reseller account which is discounted from a regular reseller account. But that really should be for your students who can’t afford to pay a lot for hosting. It shouldn’t be for your friend who is trying to make money online.

So when my conscious kicked in, I decided it was time to join the rest of the world and pay for hosting. But who to try??

I went online and carefully read hosting reviews. I decided to go with a hosting company that a lot of people recommended. They claimed that their sites were up a lot and they hardly had any problems.

The features I wanted were a cheap price (since I’m not making much money online yet) and lots of add-on domains. They had an unbeatable offer: $5.00/month for hosting with unlimited add-ons domains.

I couldn’t beat that with a stick. So I went with them.

I quickly found that, although their customer service was really good (I got immediate responses to my emails), my websites were constantly down!

It seems about half the time I randomly checked my sites, they were down. When I emailed customer service, the problem was resolved within minutes (they probably just rebooted the server), but it still happened quite a bit.

When it first started occurring, they moved me to a different server. Unfortunately it didn’t fix the problem. So they moved me to another server again. On the third server, it was still happening.

How many times were my sites down when I didn’t check? Every time my site goes down, I’m losing money twice; once because I’m losing potential sales and once because I’m paying for Google Adwords clicks that send the visitor nowhere.

So it was back to researching hosting companies.

This time I took a different approach. Instead of looking at what people said were good hosts, I did some spying.

I did a WhoIs check on a domain of a successful internet marketer. Whatever host he’s using is good enough for me. If his site goes down, he would be losing a lot more money than I would. I found that the name servers resolved to hostgator servers.

I hadn’t heard of Hostgator before but when I started poking around online, I found a lot of satisfied people. They have a set price for unlimited add-on domains, and they seem to be up a lot (I had never seen that internet marketer’s site down) so I decided to give them a try.

It’s been almost a year and I haven’t had any problems with them.

So what I’ve learned from this is that the best way to find a good webhost is to use the same webhost that other successful internet marketers are using. Thanks to the WhoIs database, this information isn’t hard to find.

http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=2011044