In my opinion, I believe that reliability, customer support and price are important to clients looking for a good web host, and to succeed as a host, should be able to offer these to their clients.

Reliability - The most important part of a successful web host is the uptime of their servers. For clients and this is from experience if you try and access your emails, or web site and both are constantly down because the server is offline, it can be the most annoying thing in the world. Downtime can be a major factor for a web host to lose clients, for the simple fact that they are paying for a service that they are not receiving. Many hosts offer an uptime guarantee of around 99%, which is acceptable because servers will go down from time tot time. A good way to maintain a reliable server is monitor every server and this can be done easily using one of the number monitoring services available.

Customer Service - A good host will offer a variety of ways for their clients to get in contact with them. Some of the popular support options that hosts offer are live support, email, phone and fax. In the event that a client’s web site goes down for whatever reason, they want to know that they will be able to contact their host and get the problem resolved. If a client finds it hard to contact their host, they can become frustrated. I would recommend if you are going to open a web hosting business, ensure that you do offer good customer support.

Price - The price of your hosting service must be reasonable, finding a mid-point between offering a good service and making a profit can be hard to find. I would recommend looking at the services on offer from a number of other hosts.