Over the past few months, I have had numerous discussions with webhost resellers about the issue of "Uptime Guarantee or Commitment". From an end user perspective e.g. website client, I can definitely understand why you would want some type of uptime guarantee; however, if you are the webhost reseller with just a reseller account and do not your own or control the server, how can you honor the uptime guarantee? I'm very curious to hear other people thoughts and comments on this simple but very explosive issue.
That is interesting, I think you should still have an up time guarantee and honor your terms of it if the server goes down. But you should make sure you find a reliable host that can guarantee you the up time so you can offer it to your costumers.
I think there are many reseller hosting in the same position as you are. The 'uptime guarantee' is like a must-have slogan of every hosting provider, whether it's true or not. Do you see any hosting provider that has 'no uptime guarantee'? I bet you can't find one. So the better thing to do is ensure that you order reseller hosting packages from a reputable provider and prepare your self since there will be downtime and you have to explain it to your customers. Good luck!
Yes, but it's largely irrelevant when you look at the details in their Terms. Most of them offer measly credits on not reaching it, which is no sort of guarantee at all....it's just a promise of a tiny credit. Then there's the problem of how to measure it. What are you measuring - server uptime (e.g. respond to ping), web site availability (is the site available?) - and how is it being measured? We run all our services on different servers. Web servers only run web sites, and there can be up over 20 other servers providing services to it such as DNS1, 2 and 3, email, email backup 1 and 2, FTP server, MySQL & MS SQL database servers, backup server, web stats servers, Support servers, control panel server, provisioning PXE servers, widows update servers, System Centre Contol Servers, Domain Controllers, Exchange Servers. What if DNS2 is down, is that downtime? What about the central FTP server and does it matter if it's unavailable for a short while? Web Stats server are important, but not critical if they are not working for a period? Or the Control Panel Server? Web servers may be more important, but what if they are up but one the MySQL servers is down - the web server is working and responding correctly after all? It comes down to what is being measured and how can you possibly provide a guarantee without defining exactly what your are offering or how it will be measured? I looked through our web site and we don't offer an uptime guarantee except for a 100% network uptime guarantee. Our monitoring reports are live and viewable to all customers - for all our servers and services - and they contain data going back several years so people can see how we're doing both in the short-term and long-term. Our uptimes are very high, but they are not 100% (probably hovering around 99.96% including scheduled maintenance over the majority of services) but I'll bet not a single customers can recall any downtime.
The answer is quite simple...you don't go with a reseller account. You get your own dedicated server and run a hosting business appropriately. It's a business after all, and if you can't afford the monthly cost for your own dedicated box, should you really be starting a business? Kids with no business plan and no money to invest start hosting "companies" with reseller accounts. Businessmen do things properly, and invest in the proper equipment, staff, etc. That said, even with a dedicated server, you are at the mercy of your datacenter, and even the equipment in your server. If your RAM goes out or your hard drive arrays goes down, you're still going to potentially have downtime. However, that downtime is going to be far less when you have control over the server.