One way you can make your business succeed is by giving it maximum online exposure. The internet offers a level platform from which businesses can go head-to-head with their competitors – big or small – and win. As a business owner, you too will want to take advantage of this opportunity by creating a website that functions perfectly, performs superbly and keeps attracting more customers every day. You should invest as much as you can to enhance your online presence in the hope that the returns will be well worth it.

That being said, you can rest assured that your ROI will be very disappointing if your web hosting provider offers shoddy service. The whole process of building a strong online business will not be very fruitful if it is all based on a shaky foundation. In other words, the quality of your web hosting service matters when it comes to the success of your business. Let us look at five reasons how this is so:

1. Good uptime improves your visitors’ browsing experience. You never know when you are going to have visitors. Your website should be up and running 24 hours a day, every single day, to cater to them. Now, almost all hosting providers promise that they have an uptime as close to 100% as they could ever possibly get. Most don’t want to make false claims, which is illegal in some parts of the world.

One company is worth keeping an eye on, though, as it continues to get as close to 100%-uptime as possible: InMotion Hosting. Proof lies in the thousands of satisfied customers that have left reviews about how they never experienced downtime while they were with the company.

2. Anyone that owns a website will know better than to displease Google for fear of being penalized when it comes to website ranking. Since 2010, they have been giving low ranks to sites with slow load speeds. A hosting provider with a bad track record of loading times can bring down all the websites that it is hosting – don’t be one of them. There are hosting companies like BlueHost that have been proven to have a minimum response time of just 915.53 milliseconds – a truly impressive speed.

3. As a business, you expect to grow. And as you progressively grow, you want your website to keep up, too. You shouldn’t need to experience downtime or loss of business every time you need to add some disk space. You shouldn’t be put on hold while the hosting provider moves your site to a bigger, more powerful server. Flexibility is a key factor in determining which provider is good for your business.

One hosting provider that has a reputation for offering a dizzying array of flexibility options to its clients is 1 & 1 Hosting. If you want your options to be classified by the difference in performance, you will get it. If it is in terms of measurable and quantitative values like size of disk space, number of mail boxes or number of domains that can be hosted, you’re welcome, too.

4. You need to be able to work on your website with relative ease. Until you grow enough to afford a few website designers or developers, you will need to tweak and configure your site on your own. The easier the hosting provider makes it for you to do so, the better a website you will have; which is obviously a plus for your business.

When it comes to a building a site with complete ease and full functionality, you cannot do better than one of the biggest hosting providers (and the biggest domain name registrar) out there: GoDaddy. The company’s website building tool not only makes creating and building a website a breeze, it also comes with plenty of additional features to help you with your creativity.

5. If you are an online business owner, you will be working towards making a profit. There would be no point in spending time, money and energy if at the end of the day you can’t trade with your visitors. Two essential parts of your website, therefore, are your shopping cart and payment gateway. With the cart, you facilitate the purchase of your products and/or services while the gateway helps you collect money from your clients.

Your shopping cart should not only be easy for your visitors to use, but it should also help you, the business owner, track sales and take inventory of your stock. The gateway should allow your visitors to make payments in as many ways as possible (credit/debit cards, PayPal etc.) and also make it easy for you to handle your earnings. Just Host, another leader in the web hosting business, offers some of the best ecommerce solutions any business owner could ask for. As part of siding with JustHost, your clients and your business are ensured security via an SSL secure server, you get to use one of the most preferred tools – the Agora Shopping Cart – and can cater to almost all payment methods.

As you have seen above, choosing a good hosting provider can truly boost your business. Therefore, before you even write a single line of code for your site, you should first select a hosting provider that offers quality service. After all, you don’t want your site to end up like the proverbial castle that was built on sand: washed away.