Although the cost of online publishing is lower than ever, several things are not to be overlooked.

Take web hosting. There maybe lack of evidence that the reliability and availability of web hosting service has an impact on search engine ranking, but still there are many reasons why we should not cut cost on this.

A forum user posted a real experience like below:

Server Down for 2 days can affect rankings?

About 2-3 of weeks or so ago our server was down for about two days… We were ranked #1 and top 10 on a bunch of relevant keywords. Our PR went up in the past month or so from a 4 to a 5 on a couple of pages on our site. This Monday I noticed we dropped of the radar on most rankings but 2 or 3 main ones where we dropped from #1 to #4 and #10… Could the server being down have caused all these?

You might be surprised that from the thread at least three users confirmed the same thing had happened to them at least once.

To be specific, the original poster reported lost ranking in Google, but others have also experienced the same thing in MSN Search.

My advice is that if you are serious about online business, get a stable web hosting service. Go shop around. You might find the best you can get with the bucks you have in your budget.

If the lost in search engine ranking is not enough to whip yourself into buying the best service you can get, consider the lost of visitors and revenue every time the server’s down.

I have proven it again and again. Consider web hosting cost as an investment. Before long, the cost will be covered and you save yourself from the headache and other technical issues, which in turn save you time in doing other more important things.

[Digital Point]