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100% Uptime Expected
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100% Uptime Expected

CoreyCorey Member
edited August 2011 in General

How many of you actually expect 100% uptime from your BUDGET web hosts even though it isn't advertised? (maybe something like 99% is advertised)

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Comments

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    Customers should expect you to abide by what your TOS/SLA states. If you state you'll provide 100% uptime then you better stick by it.

    Francisco

  • I expect to be on a stable node (no random reboots and decent performance) with at least 99.5% uptime.

  • CVPS_ChrisCVPS_Chris Member, Patron Provider

    Like fran said, if you advertise you you better have it :-P

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    99.999% is the best SLA I've seen any local data center offer and there's a reason nobody guarantees 100% uptime. Even Amazon's cloud with complete redundancy doesn't guarantee 100% uptime.

    Thanked by 1vmstormvps
  • Honestly, all i expect is to be kept properly informed of what is happening when it's happening. Nothing worse than a node being down and support is nowhere to be found.

  • Definitely wouldn't expect 100% uptime from a budget VPS. More or so around the 99.5% - 99.9% uptime neighborhood.

  • @jamson I completely agree with you, i expect to be warned of whats going on and to be able to contact support, i don't really honnor much this "SLA's"

  • I know I do shared hosting but...

    We don't offer a percentage uptime. I've seen too many companies offer up 99+% only to cover their butts with dozens of exceptions. Also it's too hard to judge if a server is really up with traceroutes.

    We do offer a guarantee where we will do everything in our power to assure uptime. With the different uplinks and power sources, we've not had much of a problem.

  • I think the best thing is to see which company is on their back end, and see their uptime records or statement for SLA.

    this can easily explain.

    thanks

  • @drmike

    Could you give me a link to your shared hosting company? I have noticed that you are very active and also very knowledgeable about hosting. I was wondering if you could provide me some cheap shared hosting

    Thanks

  • I'm not cheap. :)

    (It's managed hosting. We handle everything including software installs, upgrades and security fixes. We cater to the soccer mom crowd.)

  • kiloservekiloserve Member
    edited October 2011

    Whenever a client expects 100% uptime from us; we just ask them to move to another provider that provides them the 100% uptime they require.

    Personally speaking, I like the clients that just accept that we sometimes do have downtime (just like practically any host) and don't flood us with more support questions just to ask why their VPS was down 15 minutes. Only 1 in 50 clients is like this so they are pretty rare.

    Truthfully too, complaining about downtime usually isn't good for the client either. I don't know about other providers but we always do extra for our loyal clients like free RAM upgrades, more bandwidth, etc.

    But we never give any extra bonuses to clients who habitually email us asking why his VPS was just down <15 minutes.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    I think Google offers a 100% uptime to paying Google Apps users.

    Anyway...what I want more than a good SLA is a communicative host. If they're having problems, for heaven's sake, tell people.

    BTW, SLAs are only as good as the penalty. If Google Apps goes down, what do you get? A few more days of free service. Same thing for most VPS hosts I've seen. At best you get a small credit or maybe a free month.

  • raindog308 said: I think Google offers a 100% uptime to paying Google Apps users.

    It provides 99.9%.

  • raindog308 said: I think Google offers a 100% uptime to paying Google Apps users.

    What they don't offer is upgrades before, or even some months after, the free users get them >_<

  • I'm with raindog308. I just want to know.

    It's all about customer expectations and some customers have pretty high ones. I sure don't expect 100% uptime for a $15/yr vps and so far I've been quite happy with the service I have received.

    One important thing is to clearly define what is meant by the terms "up" and "down." Just because I can't get to my server, it doesn't really mean that it's down. It might be something with my setup, my ISP, or the internet at large. It's a real concern to make a careful distinction of "up" and "down" at my day job, but we charge our larger customers more like $15/hr or more for ecommerce services. Those kind of customers have a low tolerance of down time and it is justified.

  • @kiloserve said: But we never give any extra bonuses to clients who habitually email us asking why his VPS was just down <15 minutes.

    Damn, there goes my chance.

    Thanked by 1Infinity
  • Well personally I am glad the majority of you here on lebox are understanding. When I posted this it just seemed like we had quite a few customers a few months back that wanted to bug support 50 times a day until their server was online, like we didn't contact them at all :)

  • sleddogsleddog Member
    edited October 2011

    Corey said: Well personally I am glad the majority of you here on lebox are understanding. When I posted this it just seemed like we had quite a few customers a few months back that wanted to bug support 50 times a day until their server was online, like we didn't contact them at all :)

    I love it when a host maintains some form of status page where outages are posted and that is updated fairly frequently in the case of an major outage (say every hour or half-hour). Though please, not twitter or facebook :)

    With that you can just paste a link in those support tickets, 'updates available here', and close 'em.

  • http://buyvmstatus.com/

    **Note: This is a client-built and maintained system with no 'official' affiliation to our company (in the interest of the client remaining neutral, and not getting pegged as 'staff'/etc on the forums he participates in). That being said, the guy did an outstanding job and demanded no compensation; we're proud as hell to have such awesome clients, and I frequently refer new clients to this site when they ask about uptime.

  • sleddog said: With that you can just paste a link in those support tickets, 'updates available here', and close 'em.

    Nah... don't template your clients to death =\ Maybe if you have 50-100 tickets open about an outage... but even then, spend a few minutes to write a decent explanation before linking them elsewhere, and be sure to make sure you're not giving a carboncopy reply to an unrelated question.

  • @Corey waved a bunch of flags and spelled out "we had quite a few customers a few months back that wanted to bug support 50 times a day until their server was online"

    That's harassment of staff and against our ToS. Many other companies as well.

    I won't ToS a client for doing it, party because if we're not communicating to them, that's an issue. But if they start mail bombing us with support inquires, we will ask them to stop. The folks who do our tech support have permission from me to request to the customer to do so. if they continue, they are supposed to tell the client that they are unable to continue on with the issue and pass it along to me. That we have had to do a few times. One was a 11 year old girl who's website wasn't up because she had forgotten the tld on her domain. Not a whole lot we can do that with that one.

  • @Aldryic so how does a client get that kind of access to all of your servers? :)

  • drmike said: @Aldryic so how does a client get that kind of access to all of your servers? :)

    By informing us of the project ahead of time, and asking politely for the information they required :P Once we saw the scope of what the guy was doing, we were more than happy to see that project take off.

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    @drmike said: @Aldryic so how does a client get that kind of access to all of your servers? :)

    The client doesn't actually have access to any of the gear, his own monitoring is done by scripts he wrote himself (mostly ping tests). He does the testing remote and the whole site was going mental when HE pissed off insert country full of hackers here

    He has asked us if there was a way for him to get a read-only dump of certain stats, so we're still batting around that idea.

    Francisco

  • I was referring to a status page where humans write words, as opposed to a status monitor which, in the case of an outage, only tells me what I already know.

  • sleddog said: I was referring to a status page where humans write words, as opposed to a status monitor which, in the case of an outage, only tells me what I already know.

    http://my.frantech.ca/announcements.php

    Twitter is also a good place to catch news on what's going on with us. Or, if you're more community-minded, stop by IRC and get all that you need to know.

  • Aldryic said: Twitter is also a good place to catch news on what's going on with us. Or, if you're more community-minded, stop by IRC and get all that you need to know.

    Thanks, but I was speaking in general terms, not specifically about your company.

  • Likewise, apologies if I worded that poorly :P Just giving examples of how we do things. Perhaps other companies could also chip in with their preferred methods of information dispersal?

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    I'm in the process of building an informational site for our clients and guests... it's very bare right now but I've been working on it when time permits so it's no where near complete: http://drgn.biz/index.php

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