Downtime of web hosts should be considered. You should look into the time of day and dates any potential web host performs routine maintenance, as this may make an impact on your bottom line. If the host is offline during peak hours more than once per month, you should probably keep searching for a higher quality host. If you have been used to the same web host for several months, look at the availability of your website. An availability of 99% or more means your website is accessible all the time. If you notice a lower availability rate, look for a web host that does not encounter as many outages. Always keep in mind the frequency that outages occur with a company prior to selecting one. Never accept any excuses that a company may give you for them. Good companies will find ways to keep your website up regardless of electrical or other issues which some companies blame for outages. Regardless of how affordable a hosting service is or how highly recommended it comes, never accept excuses for site outages.
Make sure you, and not your web host, controls your domain name. If you let your host control your domain name, you may be stuck with that host if you don’t want to change domains. Some unscrupulous hosts won’t release the domain info if you leave on bad terms. If you control the domain, you can point it at another host’s nameservers and start fresh.