Quality of service will vary, depending on your hosting company. Avoid hosting services that offer free Web space in exchange for the right to place ads on your Web site. Not only will the ads be distracting to your business message, they are typically slow to load. Look for a Web-hosting company that will give you some sort of service level agreement and a monthly traffic report. Not all hosting services provide this, but the good news is as Web hosting becomes more of a commodity, services are looking for new ways to differentiate themselves and are anxious to provide these types of services, either at no cost or for a small monthly fee.
Some providers also offer tiered pricing for different classes of service.
Either of these will give you the ability to monitor service-level compliance and performance metrics. Both are easy to install and operate. This site ranks ISP performance from the end-user perspective. Initially, you can learn a lot by simply asking more about the ISP s backbone connections, peering arrangements and backup power capabilities, says Robert Spivack, vice president of sales and marketing for SPIV Technologies Group, a Web hosting, e-mail and outsourcing services company in San Jose, California. All of these affect up-time and availability much more than unscheduled downtime or HTML page downloading times.