Do You Buy Hosting Based On Uptime Guarantees?
Posted in Hosting by DB
99.999% uptime guarantee, sounds impressive huh!! Before you take out your credit card and buy that perfect plan from that impressive sounding hosting company, keep this in mind. Many people simply do not realize that this much vaunted guarantee does not take into account scheduled maintenance time. This usually is the kicker for many people. Since it is not included, the hosting company can take your website down for hours at a time while they update their software or hardware. To sound cruel they can stop to take out the trash and even pet the dog before finally getting your site back online.
So while a hosting company could have the perfect uptime record for the past “x” number of days, the same hosting company could have had 10 hours of scheduled downtime each month. While this may not be a problem for the average site owner, it is totally unacceptable if you are running a business site or if you have a very popular site. Every minute of downtime can mean lost business and since it is not covered by an uptime guarantee, you have no recourse either. Granted every company has to do maintenance but you often find hosting companies taking the scheduled maintenance route all too often and to the very extreme.
Remember folks you simply cannot monitor your own site 24 hours a day. Unless you have some form of tracking software setup chances are you will never even realize that your hosting company dropped the ball on you. Many website hosting companies bet on this fact and rarely even bother informing you that your site went down. Unless you bring it up and raise a ticket you can forget getting that reimbursement.
An uptime guarantee is like the icing on the cake. It gives you a warm fuzzy feeling but it’s completely frivolous. Focus on other selling points that really mean something to you instead of these guarantees. Every hosting company, big or small, shared, dedicated, grid or cloud computing, all have had and will have downtimes. Its how efficiently your host can recover from a downtime and how forthcoming and communicative your host is during a downtime that matters.
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March 22nd, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Good Blog. I will continue reading it in the future. Nice layout too.
Aaron Wakling