The seriousness of a number of businesses is judged through their website. Websites, as such, are the first point of contact between a business and its potential customers. Some visitors (potential customers) will pay attention to each and every detail on your website. Besides the general look and feel, they will check the content to see if it is free from errors etc. This is the reason why a lot of people/ businesses spend a lot of time and energy in ‘dressing up’ their website and ensuring that it looks great. However, the ‘look and feel’ and content of the website are not the only things that the potential customers look at. They also look at how fast the website comes up i.e. whether the web pages load up quickly or do they take a lot of time to show up; and it goes without saying that if the web pages don’t load up at all, the potential customer will never return to your website for business. This is where the web host comes in. If the web host is not good enough then you might have the server down for quite some time. At the time of selling their service, some web hosts boast about 99.99% uptime to you; but they don’t actually keep their promise. Though the time taken by web pages to load up is primarily dependent on the size of your pages, the web servers (and hence the web hosts) have a role to play too. If the servers are too busy (might be due to overloading of servers by web hosts), it might take time to serve your web pages to the website visitor. Some web hosts might not provide the promised bandwidth to you. They might provide a lower bandwidth than what you have paid for. This too can severely hit your website. 

So, the web hosts have a big role to play in creating a good first impression on your website visitors (your potential customers). And you must devote sufficient time in evaluating the web hosts before you finally select the best one. But, do not forget to review your website content and ‘dress it up’ for your customers. You need to take care of both the factors and ensure that they are perfect. After all, a business is not a business if it does not portray seriousness.