Uptime Guarantee - Must Need in Web Hosting

Monday, 13 September 2010

Quite often, you might have noticed web-hosting providers boasting an uptime percentage of 99% or 99.9%. Uptime percentage is a measure of frequently the service will run. Although these numbers seem to be impressive to a customer, once you learn about how they are calculated, you will deliberate every time you encounter an uptime guarantee which is seemingly respectable.

What does a guarantee cover?

In almost every case, the uptime that a web-host refers to covers only the server, it does not consider the network. IF the network issues and maintenance were to be covered too, then downtime would heavily outweigh the uptime guarantee that has been advertised. This is the reason why there are some customers who run mission-critical operations seek service level agreements or SLAs that pay you in case the agreement is exceeded by the downtime. Unfortunately, many host providers go not offer this. There is more complication when you consider the possible downtime that you might have to experience in the whole year. The 99% that seemed near perfect no longer looks that attractive.

Let us take a few examples. An uptime of 98% implies that during the course of 12 months, your website ahs the possibility of a downtime of 175hours, 19 minutes, which is approximately a week. Consider 99% and the downtime is 27 hours which isn’t great either. An uptime of 99.9% means that the website will be down for 8 hours, 46 minutes during the course of a year. However, unfortunately, the downtime is a lot more than this number. What’s worse is that most customers can do nothing about this except suffer with no compensation for the downtime that exceeded the agreement.

How to Discern a Respectable Uptime:

Discerning a respectable uptime can be a perplexing issue and the best means of approaching it is by selecting a well reputed web hosting provider. Though there is nothing that can be done about downtime, at least choosing a reputed company will be wise as it will try its best not to manipulate the uptime percentage and do its best to provide you with maximum availability. Search for a hosting provider who is supportive so that in case something happens, you can always contact him and get to know when and how restoration of the service will take place.

Talking of uptime guarantee, it is one thing that has to be looked into is you are particular about your site’s availability. Try to look for a company that has its uptime percentage guarantee on a monthly basis. It will be harder to get any accurate compensation for the downtime incurred if the uptime is calculated n a yearly basis. Various measures are taken to taken to ensure dependability by the hosting providers who are well reputed in the industry, yet things can go wrong at times. When that happens, you would want a hosting provider who offers a fair compensation with an uptime guarantee that considers your interests.