I've seen thousands of hosts who claim that they offer 99.9% uptime. The question is - who is really able to do that?

I'm looking around for a reasonably priced host that can really offer this (I do understand that for this uptime, the price can't be in the budget range, but neither do I want it at the Verio range :D). Can anyone give me a list here?

No, this is not a request - I'm just asking for opinions and suggestions from the board on hosts who can really meet 99.9% at an affordable price.

Look for any host that has third-party uptime statistics on their website.

Uptime statistics are not this:
# uptime
23:45:20 up 35 days, 11:03, 1 user, load average: 0.05, 0.02, 0.00

Unbelievably, I've seen hosts try to pass the above off as "uptime statistics" or even "100% uptime". So the server has been running 35 days... what about Apache? The mail server? Your network?

:rolleyes:

Real uptime statistics are from Alertra, WebSitePulse, etc. (e.g. a third party.) Hosts that can stick to their uptime guarantees often offer these statistics as proof. Don't accept anything less -- and don't accept any monitoring that isn't done by a third party.

Originally posted by Simpli-Erica
Look for any host that has third-party uptime statistics on their website.

Uptime statistics are not this:
# uptime
23:45:20 up 35 days, 11:03, 1 user, load average: 0.05, 0.02, 0.00

Unbelievably, I've seen hosts try to pass the above off as "uptime statistics" or even "100% uptime". So the server has been running 35 days... what about Apache? The mail server? Your network?

:rolleyes:

Real uptime statistics are from Alertra, WebSitePulse, etc. (e.g. a third party.) Hosts that can stick to their uptime guarantees often offer these statistics as proof. Don't accept anything less -- and don't accept any monitoring that isn't done by a third party.
So you would say an in-house monitory system is a scam? So in order, by your words, for a user to trust a host, they must first have paid Alertra (or others) x amount of dollars to show what they could show in a much more professional manner on their own?

We use in-house, but also have alertra as "back-up" for cases like you state, where the general consensus is to label a host as a liar if they use their own system.

IHSL, while I agree that in-house monitoring can be as reliable as 3rd-party monitoring, there is always the likelihood that numbers can be manipulated. I am saying that there is a 'likelihood' and not that is always happens, but the chance is there.

Simpli-Erica, I appreciate you sharing with me how to not read uptime stats like "23:45:20 up 35 days, 11:03, 1 user, load average: 0.05, 0.02, 0.00" as acceptable uptime markers. I'm sure there are a number of people out there who use this as an indicator as well :)

Originally posted by IHSL
So you would say an in-house monitory system is a scam? So in order, by your words, for a user to trust a host, they must first have paid Alertra (or others) x amount of dollars to show what they could show in a much more professional manner on their own?

What I'm saying is that a monitoring system on your own network is not going to be 100% accurate.

What happens if the router in front of both of your systems goes down? Your monitoring system, of course, will still show 100% uptime, since you can ping back and forth on the same network. You just can't get out to the Internet. You're down to the rest of the world, but this example monitoring system won't show that downtime.

Alertra and WebSitePulse will.

Your monitoring system may be set up differently than the above example. However, the above example is the most common in-house monitoring system I've seen -- and yes, I consider that invalid, as it doesn't take network outages into account.

Valid point, but of course, it would be pretty much a given that you do not operate it on your own primary location.

Our "In House" solution is run from outside the two main DC's that we use, and in the main frame of thing's, we've never had any arguements.

I do remember someone saying the same kind of thing as yourself to a tech, but i only got part of the conversation. The person questioned our tech, and went as far as calling him a liar, of course the tech then sent the url to the server in question's uptime stats (full suite) at Alertra, and surprinsgly (or not i guess) we never heard from the guy again, apart from at billing time. He's still a customer... :laugh:

You may be lucky ending up on a shared server with no or few resource abusers, spammers and where the host doesn't overfill the server with accounts and then you could get that type of uptime in a shared environment, but if you want to be sure get your own dedicated server with 'no neighbours'.

John

So, in conclusion, is there any host that offers 99.9% uptime?

This post has made me feel very unsecure with my current host.

Recently discussed here:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=215334

I like this quote by blue27 from that post:

30 days per month = 43200 minutes.

99% uptime = 432 minutes of downtime.
99.9 % uptime = 43.2 minutes of downtime.
99.99% uptime = 4.32 minutes of downtime.


Is it possible, sure...maybe not every month, but 11 out of 12 isn't bad.

I've seen hosts like Lunarpages who seem to offer and meet it quite well. It's a pity they don't do WHM, though - I'm hosting a few of my friends and do need it ;)

8 posts later and no one recommending any hosts?

Originally posted by code_renegade
I've seen hosts like Lunarpages who seem to offer and meet it quite well. It's a pity they don't do WHM, though - I'm hosting a few of my friends and do need it ;)

8 posts later and no one recommending any hosts?

99.99% network uptime is okay but 99.99% webhosting server uptime is not that easy to archive unless they have clustering servers.

We use an in-house system, and it calculates very accurately, and is comparible to Alertra's stats for us as well.

I think the main issue is, when a company states an uptime average, they should be willing to prove it, IMO. I mean just because we advertise 99.9% uptime, does not mean anything to potential clients. The ability to prove it, goes much further than just saying it.

I think an in-house system, coupled with a 3rd Party system, is ideal. However, not always possible for some hosts.

Any recommended hosts ?

I'd be nervous if a host was constantly posting 100% uptime! No patches? :D

99.9% isn't very difficult. We consistently beat them month after month, and I am sure a lot of other hosts do as well.

End of the day, numbers is just one thing. Look also for

1. Communications - Do the hosts proactively offer information when the occasional incident happen?

2. The reason for the downtime - As mentioned, there's the occasional patch that needs a reboot. There could be the occasional hardware failure. Or it could simply be the odd DDOS. All this are also dependent on 1.


As for recommendations, why don't you define your specifications more clearly (other than your uptime requirement) as I am sure that can help others help you better. example technologies required, preference of OS, control panels if any, your bandwidth space requirements as well as your budget. That will help the forum narrow down for you the hosts.

Look at this!

http://www.datacities.com/network.php

They look like they have good uptime.


p.s Where can I get a script like this? It looks greath :D

The best thing to do is just do your due dilagence on the forums and see if there has been any mention of downtime.

I might add that server downtime is unavoidable for for kernel upgrades.

However, there is no excuse for network downtime... unless a switch / nic went out. Even then a contingancey plan should be in place and you should be backonline within 30 minutes.

I hope this helps.

To offer a few suggestions for the thread starter. 99.9% uptime is certainly possible and I think many hosts meet or exceed that every month. 40+ minutes a month for upgrades is plenty of time to maintain 99.9% uptime, if you schedule your upgrades intelligently.

I would also agree that a host's custom monitoring solutions are just as accurate as services like Alertra provided they are not located on the same network as the sites being monitored.

I think that if you focus on the quality of the datacenters that the hosts are located in you will find that the average uptime improves. Fully staffed, reliable datacenters are able to respond more quickly to Host's requests and resolve issues that can create downtime. The more reliable the datacenter, the more reliable the Host's uptime should be. Now a top notch datacenter is not the total answer, an incompetent host can still mess things up pretty good. However a reputable datacenter is essential as the primary building block.

When you start looking at the hosts that offer 99.9% uptime, check their datacenter and see if the datacenter has been able to sustain that level of uptime. If they haven't, then it's pretty obvious the host advertising 99.9% is not being completely honest.

This is kind of a 'religious issue' ;) - We have had 99.9% uptime on our servers since we moved to a better data center, but it also depends on the kind of customers you're 'lucky' to get. Also, what host has 100% control over what, say, 200 customers on a server decides to do at the same time? What if they, for instance, decides to execute their scripts, independently of each other, at the same time and the load increases? Such things happens in the shared environment. And if they can execute php scripts as user 'nobody' re. phpsuexec? - (we're using cPanel servers). We can go in afterwards, and punish those who abuses server resources, but we can't predict and control the actions of all users on a server in a shared environment. I agree that high uptimes are possible but I prefer to be realistic towards customers. Therefore we do not offer any uptime guarantee anymore but our uptime are better now than it were when we offered one. Just my opinion/experience ;)

John

We have had 99.9% uptime on our servers since we moved to a better data center, This is my point exactly, the better the datacenter the more likely a host's uptime will be better as well...

Greetings:

The companies offering true 99.99% do so by building on a solid foundation.

They either co-locate quality (look up the info in consumer reports -- aka brand names) equipment at a data center who can provide them with 99.999% to 100% network up time (what good is server uptime if the network is down?) or rent from a data center providing the same SLA (again with quality equipment and SLA’s on the data center side).

AND

They have taken the time to secure and set up their servers properly (does anyone remember the post from the $6 per year hosting provider who stated a DDoS attack damaged software, and it turned out they were hacked; hack != DDoS).

AND

While they keep their software up to date, they take care not to install BETA technology; and they notify their customers of software update times (downtime due to scheduled maintenance that is truly scheduled is not counted against a 99.99% or any other up time figure).

AND

They do have an enterprise level network monitoring system that can notify a technician within 60 seconds of a problem; and that technician does respond promptly.

All of the above can be done without getting into load balancing et all.

Thank you.

Does it really matter if its 99.9 or 95%?

What if they upgrade on a sunday night?

Originally posted by promo2go
Does it really matter if its 99.9 or 95%?

What if they upgrade on a sunday night?
One Man's sunday night, is another Man's monday morning.

It also depends if it is just your hobby site or a site transacting e-commerce every second. For example, if Amazon goes down for just 1 hour every month, you can calculate the lost in revenues.

Sprintserve, I'm not really looking for a new host at the moment, but I do find my host's 99.7% ~ 99.6% downtime a little hard to work with. Maybe it's just me, but the downtime ALWAYS occurs just when I want to update my website. Given the time zone difference, it would be around morning or noon when the downtime occurs.

It can be a little troubling when you're doing ecommerce like me, thus my search for a host who can truly offer 99.9%. After all, no first-time customer will stick around when the site suddenly decides to go down.

Budget-wise, I'm okay with anything around US$15+/- a month, if anyone is going to be so kind as to offer me suggestions! Cpanel will be nice, WHM is practically a must, and some of my friends do host materials that may be considered 'adult', so an adult-friendly host is important (and that drastically reduces the list of potential hosts, doesn't it? :D) . And of course, the 99.9% uptime.

EDIT: The budget bracket is low because my ecommerce site is actually quite small :stickout:

You may be hard pressed to get a list of hosts for this thread for several reasons. However I will suggest the following guidelines when uptime is important and/or considering a host:

- Monitor the host for a month or two if time permits using one of the free/trial services.

We monitor DC's before we engage them. We have some DC's we have been monitoring for a year to get an accurate account of uptime.


- Read their policies (TOS) and make sure the uptime guaranteed is backed by a SLA. When a host is willing to refund you money because of downtime you can bet they are not planning on unscheduled downtime. Afterall webhosting is a business and you do not go into business to lose money.

Last but not least monitoring reports whether internal, external, or 3rd party do not necessarily tell the true state of affairs. The monitoring interval is important. Since anything more than 20mins could escape detection. A host, network engineer, and/or sys admin worth their salt can fix most problems in 20 mins and your report may be none the wiser.

Additionally 20 min monitoring intervals may give less than accurate downtimes. Eg: host goes down for 22 mins. The report will reflect a downtime of 40 mins. Obviously this is not accurate as the host has been up for the last 18 minutes. However since it is only monitored every 20 mins you get an inaccurate report.

Last but not least the level of monitoring is also important. Some only ping the server. However the server can respond properly even while it's unable to serve content.

You can surely ask the host all of these particulars, consider their response and make an educated guess based on the above and/or personal recommendations.


Good luck with your quest and Happy New Year!

Originally posted by sprintserve
2. The reason for the downtime - As mentioned, there's the occasional patch that needs a reboot. There could be the occasional hardware failure. Or it could simply be the odd DDOS. All this are also dependent on 1.


Good point. There is a difference between scheduled downtime and unscheduled downtime.

Your uptime stats refect your uptime. "Some" of your downtime might have been scheduled, but it is still reflected in your downtime.

Make sure you as a client know what the uptime guarantee is promising. There is a difference between service and server uptime (apache vs the server).

Cheers
Jeff

I try for 99.9% hit or surpass it 11/12 months. There was that time back at fastservers which I left around a year ago. Other than that it's pretty easy to keep that guarantee provided there isn't massive hardware failure hacker attack or anything else unplanned that downs the server.

Modwest.com has a status meter for uptime and it's been at 100% for a long time now.

As some had mentioned, 100% isn't realistic. 100% uptime just isn't totally realistic. They either:

1. Doesn't monitor often enough (missing some of the downtimes)
2. They do not patch their servers
3. They aren't 100% truthful about their uptime.

Greetings:

“Does it really matter if its 99.9 or 95%?

What if they upgrade on a sunday night?”

1. If the upgrades are pre-scheduled, announced, then that generally does not count against down time.

2. Our parent company hosts business customers; some of whom do over a million per month in sales. So yes, every single day of the week matters, and it does matter they are 99.9% or better.

Thank you.

The other issue is the measurement of uptime for a server or a site. There are all sorts of exclusions that people like to use....except for scheduled maintenance is one. Also, people define what is uptime....the server is running, the network is working, the server can be pinged. None of these are what the customer really cares about. In the long run, the measurement which means the most is "the percentage of time the site can be reached." I can assure you a lot of the 99.9% uptime hosts would fall significantly if they used this measurement.

Just as an example....none of the data centers we use had a single minute of data center downtime during November or to this point in December, but I shall use November as an example. So, many hosts would claim 100% uptime. However, we did have what I would consider downtime on two servers. On the first, we had a little problem upgrading the kernel and had to reboot twice. 10 minutes time during which the sites could not be reached. On the second, we had a problem with bind which caused us 13 minutes downtime. So, on those two servers the uptime was 99.98% and 99.97% from a customer perspective. But so many would have claimed 100% and, by their definition, been correct. DDos attacks are similar....server may be up, but can't be reached. The customer doesn't really care the reason. All that ultimately matters is can his customer reach and use his site.

Frankly, thats why all these SLA's and guarantees are somewhat useless. Credits don't make up for downtime. If you can exclude enough things you will never recognize downtime. However, ultimately the customer knows the performance. And, the customer decides whether to stay or leave.

An example....few would argue the quality of Rackspace. However, their sla is
Rackspace guarantees that the network will be available 100% of the time in a given month, excluding scheduled maintenance. They also promise replacement of hardware within 1 hour....very impressive. However, to the customer if they meet all that but have a hard drive to fail, here is what would be encountered. One hour down to replace. Two hours to restore from backup and get everything back to fully functioning. Total down 3 hours. To the customer, uptime for the month of 99.58%. Per Rackspace sla, 100%. However, in that case, I would still rate their performance exceptional, just would disagree from a customer perspective with their definition of uptime.

Just to point out some clever wording. The Rackspace SLA says the network will be "available" 100% of the time in a given month. What they do not guarantee is that the speeds will remain constant during that time. While some ups and downs occur normally with line speeds, during a DDOS or issues like the Slammer could slow things down to a crawl (inaccessible to many with sites timing out) they have not technically breached their SLA.

Greetings Incognito:

"So, on those two servers the uptime was 99.98% and 99.97% from a customer perspective."

If you were offering 99.9% up time, then both servers were on par for that guarantee.

Also, on the hard drive failure. We have a customer on an SLA of 99.999%. They had a bad hard drive two weeks ago. They had zero down time.

Why? RAID with hot plug SCSI drives. Pull the bad drive, replace with good drive, next day spare drive to site, and ready for the next one.

Thank you.

I think most hosts will agree with me that 100% uptime on the server itself is almost a suicide. Often there's a glitch with some services like SMTP/POP3 on a server (and those running Cpanel understand what I'm saying).. the trick here is how fast can you fix a problem when it surfaces.

On the other hand 100% network uptime is possible.. depending on the backbone and the SLA's they give you.

Originally posted by code_renegade
Sprintserve, I'm not really looking for a new host at the moment, but I do find my host's 99.7% ~ 99.6% downtime a little hard to work with. Maybe it's just me, but the downtime ALWAYS occurs just when I want to update my website. Given the time zone difference, it would be around morning or noon when the downtime occurs.

It can be a little troubling when you're doing ecommerce like me, thus my search for a host who can truly offer 99.9%. After all, no first-time customer will stick around when the site suddenly decides to go down.


If you are truly looking at them doing maintainance during your nighttimes, you may want to look at a host in your region or country. But where I am, many hosts offices only work 9 to 5 from Mon to Fri. So you may still end up with something worst.

99.9% really isn't an issue as many hosts will testify as long as they know what they are doing.

My experiance with 6 Webhosting companys...in 4 years

Ranging from...

Extreemly cheap, must be overselling

TO

Damn this price is HIGH! I could have had dedicated for this price!


99,9% IS BULLTSHIT when it comes to the overall!

I think if I look at it all, the uptimes where more like 98% upt to 99,5%

I didn't count 1 host who was able to manage beeing offline for 26-28 hours!

I think if I look at it all, the uptimes where more like 98% upt to 99,5%

I don't think that's representative for all hosts out there. 99,5% is a reasonable uptime but many have a better average uptime than that over the year. 98% is not good at all.

John

I couldn't justify less than 99.9% uptime to my clients. I know I wouldn't stand for less than that myself I can't expect anyone else to either. Less than 99.9% uptime can become even more unacceptable depending on what your target market is.

Greetings:

We are in our 8th year in business, providing business Internet services for over 7.

I would argue that 99.9% is highly possible; and the good ones beat that on a regular basis.

Even the two servers mentioned by Incognito beat 99.9% hands down.

So it is extremely possible.

Thank you.

It is easy to put down numbers!

If you claim you uptime is 99.5% or higher! Please proove it by putting a link to a known and recodnized monitoring website.

Like they say... talk is cheap!

If you claim you uptime is 99.5% or higher! Please proove it by putting a link to a known and recodnized monitoring website.

I don't know where you had your bad experience, but 99.5%+ uptime should be the rule rather than the exception. You must have been very unlucky. :)

John

Greetings John:

"but 99.5%+ uptime should be the rule rather than the exception. You must have been very unlucky."

Agreed for quality hosts.

From our 8 years experience, we've found that if you stick with a quality data center that provides real life (not just in numbers) 99.999% to 100% network up time, stick with quality hardware (we use HP servers running $4,500 each), and have an enterprise network monitoring system which can let you know in 60 seconds of a problem, then you can easily make 99.9% up time.

Incognito proved it with his servers.

And Watcher_TVI and others like him who either do not oversell or do so on a limited, monitored, and careful basis probably find they can have high up time as well.

==

Greetings Donnie-D:

"Please prove it by putting a link to a known and recognized monitoring website." (editor note: spelling errors corrected)>

Our link would be to our own system which was battle tested by NTT/Verio’s enterprise division. So many would claim that to be circular logic <smile>.

I believe the real proof is talking with current and former customers of a given host. I still remember the on-line bank we hosted from 1996 to 1999 (they brought the service in-house) where the founder of the bank stated they had 100% up time.

So ask for references, and do call them on the phone.

Thank you.

Sorry if I missed some info on your site

With all respect for your website

http://www.wemanageservers.com is like maze to me.

Greetings:

We Manage Servers is our managed service division; that division provides no hosting.

Thank you.

Originally posted by Donnie-D
It is easy to put down numbers!

If you claim you uptime is 99.5% or higher! Please proove it by putting a link to a known and recodnized monitoring website.

Like they say... talk is cheap!



And a lot of providers do exactly that. We publicize our WebSitePulse stats; they monitor from a third-party location, so this encompasses ALL downtime (server software; server hardware; network.) I know there are many others that do the same; HTTPMe is one that I remember seeing. Most providers that take the time to make third-party stats available are confident enough in their services to showcase that they really do have 99.9% or better uptime.

I've stayed out of this thread thus far, but I know from experience that 99.9% server uptime is not only obtainable, but fairly easily obtainable. As dynamicnet says, you have to use good hardware, have hot spares available onsite, and pick a provider with an excellent repuation for uptime (and preferably a provider that has an uptime guarantee to you.) Typically, this requires more forethought and planning than just getting a server and placing it online, but there are many, many hosting companies that consistently meet and exceed 99.9% overall uptime.

Greetings Simpli-Erica:

RE: Good hardware.

And it is ALL of YOUR FAULT, Erica, that I'm hooked on my Treo 600 <big smile>.

Chatter and Snappermail do wonders when tied to the monitoring system ;-)

Thank you again.

Originally posted by dethfire
Modwest.com has a status meter for uptime and it's been at 100% for a long time now.

Just wanted to comment on this. Our status reporting page (status.modwest.com) has indeed displayed 100% HTTP uptime for a while, and this is true. Not sure it has been covered in this thread, but another way to enhance availability is via load-balancing. We run a cluster of webservers which all serve all our customer websites. So if one has a problem, it is automatically removed from the cluster until the issue is resolved.