Hosting company downtime

How often is acceptable? How often does your hosting company need to take down the server even for a few minutes or seconds?

 

My host (The one I admin/run) generaly tries to keep the downtime to less than 5 minutes a week if doing repairs/server maitnence, and other than that tries to keep it up all the time.


The max downtime I'd accept from a host would be 1%.. and even that is too much..


Josh

 

I think it will follow the rule of : you get what you pay for.

If you pay $5 month expect some big down time. If you pay 100/mo -no down time

 

Lycos webcentre is extremely poor host with extremely unhelpful technicians. I am going to start a website aimed at "lycos hosting" and let everyone know how poor they really are

 

5 minutes per week sounds about right. K let's do math: 5 divided by 60 x 24 x 7 .... less than 0.05 % right?

 

5 minutes a week seems like a maximum to me.

 

Actually 5 mins per week sounds pretty often to me

I am using two different hosts. I hardly receive notifications of server down from the cheaper host but every so often I get maintenance notifications(thus server down) from another host which charges way more. Not necessarily mean the cheaper host is better, maybe they are just not sending out notifications...

 

I said thats IF we have to do server mateneince, but we dont have to do that every week

Josh

 

I am sure that you can get hosting with firms that "guarantee" 99.99% up time. I have been hosting with a local New Zealand host and have Internetseer pinging the sites regularly and we have had no reported down-time once since March 2003.

That's how it should be, if they have redundant servers installed .... although you might have to pay a little bit more for this.

 

So how much do they charge monthly?

Another question I should have asked in the begining is, what steps do you guys take to prepare for server down, esp for interactive websites where users enter information? Post notification on your webpages?

 

I am paying around NZD55 (around USD35) a month. This includes 50MB web hosting and access to their secure server for transactions. It might sound a bit pricey but our online shop software is also running off their servers.

But, I am sure you can find a reliable host in your area by paying a little more (and way less than USD35 a month).

And, you can't really do much about down time, I suppose. 'cos if the server's down, it won't display any pages (including pages displaying errors etc). The only thing you can do is host with a company that has redundant servers (which contain backups of your website, so if one goes down, it automatically switches to the backup server).

Isn't that right? Please correct me if I am wrong.

Add: I am also paying NZ$29.95 a month for a 100MB hosting plan with 6GB traffic, PHP and mySQL, 3 sub-domains etc from Web Farm for my personal website.

 

We are paying US$65 a month for 400MB space + 20G traffic + SQL server. It is a little more than others but we wanted one that is reliable, several sites I do research on also use them as host.

Yes I know you cant do anything when it is down. I was just trying to gather what others do as preparation. Maybe posting a message prior or something.

 

Well as a hosting company I can tell you that down time comes in all flavors. Everything from network failures, power failures, equipment failures, you name it. Network failures can be minimized by choosing a host that has mulitple connections to the internet, is multihomed, has their own IP space, mulitiple routers, etc.. Power failures can be minimized by choosing a host that has battery backup, generator, etc. Equipment failures are something that just happen, so if you are on a server that goes the only thing that is going to insure your site is available is if you are doing some type of mirroring. Hosts that offer this (we do for a price) are the best option.

Now when it comes to software updates, security updates, updates to PHP that break things, updates to mySQL that break things, etc.. That is another thing that is just going to happen. Typically we, and many hosts try to do everything we can to minimize down time. This includes having a site that lists updates that are performed, notifying customers directly of major planned updates, etc. Ultimately when it comes to any software upgrade on a server that hosts your site (and there are many in the course of normal month) there is generally no way to know what the outcome will be, ie., good/bad.

So asking what is acceptable? Hard question. As little as possible would be my answer. The thing you should really focus on is, "how fast does my host fix a problem when it occurs?". That is what is really important!!!

One last thought to those that expect the world of any provider of any service. We strive to have the most redundancy we can, but we can never be 100%, NO ONE CAN. That said, are you being redundant? Think about it. Why would you rely on your provider and providers provider to be redundant, when you are not? That said, if your web site/business is that important you should not only use a redundant provider, but in addition you should get another redundant provider and mirror your web site/DNS, etc.. Many providers (us included) can work with other hosting companies to make this possible. Again, it is not always "cheap", so you have to think about just how redundant you need to be.

As an example we have a system where by we build two servers, set them up to mirror one another and use BIGIP/3DNS servers to mirror and load balance your site. So if your site is unavailable because of network issues, or a downed server or your colo provider is down, your web site is up. But this goes a step further. While both are available the 3DNS servers make a decision based on your geographic location (your IP) as to which server is the best/most available/closest to you in terms of delivering content.. Kinda like Akamai does, except we are not caching data. Now you could use more than 2 servers obviously with this setup, but it is not necessary.

Again, not cheap. You buy the boxes, you buy the 3DNS hardware, you own it, you manage it. One server and one 3DNS server goes in our facility and the other one goes in yours, or some other colo. It's the ultimate in redundancy, and does not place the burden of providing 99.99999% uptime on one entity.

Anyway..

 

Thanks Mia for the very detailed response. Learnt quite a few things from your post.

I am not sure if important is the word to describe the site. The website has just started and it doesnt even have much traffic, yet. However, it can be a concern if a user loses his/her data while inputting stuff, or if the server-side variables are reset(due to server down) when they are supposed to have values. In any case, it is good to know what the options are out there, very informative post.. =)

 

Do our customers care if our website is secured or not ? Is it better for an online store to redirect the customer directly to the checkout without making them creating any store account ?

 

Your whole website doesn't need to be secured. But you should have a secure certificate - whether shared thru your host or your own. Having an account doesn't necessarily mean it's secure. You can have a login area; but it still goes across in plain text, thereby capturable by anyone with a sniffer. And if you keep sensitive info on the same server: it's not necessarily secure. If you download the secure stuff via ftp - it ain't secure. If info is sent to you via email - it's not secure unless you use some kind of encryption like pgp (you would be absolutely amazed at the ecommerce sites that say their all for security; yet send your order with all of your info, including cc info - via email to 4 or 5 people)

Your best bet is to have an order form secured by a certificate, then have a merchant account on another server. In other words; your secure form transmits to their secure form. That way; any info transferred would be transferred to their https server; and the info is encrypted. Plus; info is stored on another server: a merchant accouunt server is more likely to be secured properly than a shared host would be.

 

Depending on how critical your website / web application are. Can it afford to down for few minutes or even seconds ? For business website, I would say the 30 - 60 mins downtime for the period of 12 months is acceptable if you are paying for $10 -30 per month. Go for dedicated server for more reliability.

 

For the last four months my company has had an overall server uptime of 100%. In February it was 99.99%. I don't want this to come off as an advertisement, but I honestly believe server uptime plays a crucial role in the success of any web hosting company. Five minutes may not sound like a lot of time, but if a prospective client is trying to view that website during those five minutes, that could mean the difference between the success or failure of that website. It's really that important.