Tremendous effort goes into designing and developing a professional website. You have to take into consideration various factors like look & feel, website content (including sales copy), search engine optimization etc. After all, your website is the gateway to your business. It showcases your capabilities to the world at large. However, all that effort, time and money that you have put into creating a website, could go down the drain if you don’t have a good web host. The importance of a good web host is in no way lesser than the website design. Best way to understand the importance of choosing a good web host is to understand the losses that can arise from a bad web host: 

1. Loss of business opportunities: Since your website is the gateway to your business, if your website is down (server downtime) it closes the gate for business opportunities too. And who knows, one of these blocked opportunities might have been the big break that you had been looking for. Believe me; no one is going to return to a site that they found was down when they visited it.
   
2. Loss of reputation: Your website also reflects your level of seriousness with business. If your website is down a lot of times during the day or if it takes too long to load, people visiting your website may construe you as a non-serious businessman/ businesswoman. A bad web hosting service might cast doubts on your professionalism and reliability, thus resulting in a loss of reputation (and eventually loss of business).
   
3. Loss of revenue: A lot of time is lost in dealing with a bad web hosting service. You have to constantly monitor your website and coordinate with the web host to ensure that your website is up and running. Thus precious time and effort is lost in performing a task that has resulted from the virtue of having a bad web host. This time could otherwise have been invested for the growth of your business. Moreover, the time and money spent on designing and developing the website would be rendered useless if the web host is not good enough to keep it hosted. So, it’s an indirect loss of revenue too.
   
4. Loss in the form of increased expenses and misinterpretations: A bad web hosting service could be misinterpreted as bad website design or bad marketing. This might lead to efforts being directed towards improving the website design and marketing strategy; thus leading to unnecessary expenses and shift of focus.

User reviews can be of great help in choosing a good web host. You can check http://www.webhostingreviewdirectory.com a website which consolidates user reviews from a number of websites and presents them to you on per host basis.