I really dont understand what this thread is for.. There are many which proclaims 99.9% uptime but never provides. Thanks.
99.9% uptime every month isn't that hard to achieve, which is probably why a lot of web hosting providers advertise it to make them look better, especially hosts that always seem to go below 99.9% every month. Web hosting providers that manage their servers a lot better will have uptime between 99.9% to 99.95% every month. You can work out server/network uptime at easyuptimecalc.com.
Just to know kids.. When we "the hosting providers" say 99.9% uptime .. that 99.9% give us the right to have +-30min downtime per month. You better look and start wondering about the Unlimited b*llsh*ts that most of the hosting providers offer. like unlimited space.. There is no such thing like unlimited space.
I think that is something they offer as guarantee. But in any way you always can check current stats and compare with other hosts
Not everyone achieves 99.9% uptime, and even these guarantees are largely worthless as they only provide a refund of tiny amounts of credit if the 99.9% is not achieved. The 99.9% uptime, if it is being measured, is only as accurate as the service monitoring it. If the monitoring is something like every 15 minutes then that type of monitoring is next to useless. Monitoring has to be at least every 5 minutes to be reasonably accurate, but intervals of 1 minute of less are much better. It also depends up on how the monitoring service is set up. Many monitoring solutions have inbuilt buffers that only register downtime as being "real" when there have been X number of consecutive downtimes measured - this may seem senseless, but it does smooth out issues with busy connections when a service is not down but there in an issue somewhere on the internet that doesn't allow the monitoring service to connect. However, it also lead to either excessively optimistic results or excessively pessemistic results...and it's hard to tell how accurate it really is. True 99.99% uptime is virtually impossible to be acheived by standard hosting unless your site operates on some sort of redundant cluster. Servers need to be rebooted sometimes for upgrades, software installs, or configuration changes. Another thing to remember about the efficacy of monitoring is WHAT is being monitored. Pings hardly count because a "down" server that is no longer serving web sites or running php may easily still respond to pings. Then there's the issue of what does the 99.9% uptime represent - network uptime, server uptime (what? pings? sites being served?). What about database uptimes? Email uptime? what part of the service is being measured? How can a company really know what it's real average uptime is. A small company with a couple of servers may know, but a large company with lots of servers may not have an accurate figure. Then it comes to what uptime/downtime really matters. If their stats server only acheived 99.2% uptime does that really matter in the scheme of things if all that server does is present web stats for you - when you look at them? Then there is DNS. Most companies operate several DNS servers (although some run them all on the same piece of hardware) but assuming that they have 3 separate DNS servers all running on separate hardware. Would it really matter if one of their servers only had 50% uptime? Of course it wouldn't, although I'd be worried about that server but not about the service it was running. There's a lot more to uptime monitoring than meets the eye. How accurate it is depends upon who, what, when, and how the monitoring service is running and unless you know the details of the monitoring in many cases it doesn't really tell you very much.
Very Good point post RonBrown. I monitor my servers with Pingdom, and check the uptime using HTTP as this covers both server uptime and network uptime. I also set the interval time to one minute. There have been a few occasions where Pingdom reported a server being down when it actually wasn't, but this was just because of the IP/port not being allowed in the server firewall. Overall though, I think Pingdom is great. The above setup works well enough for me, at least for now anyway.
As said what should be looked at is the actual unlimited things they offered, well people have read carefully the T&Cs as most the time everything is unlimited until you reach the limits and this is said with a line text such as, as long as your website don't overload the server, which means nothing at the end as each provider as it's own rules about it. Also it's good to have unlimited space and bandwith but if at the end you end up with a 5-7% cpu and/or memory usage limit, you can' t run anything but a normal website or blog that don't get much traffic