What's a fair uptime guarantee policy for both the customer and web host? Some uptime guarantee's just don't make any sense.. Consider what I just read at *****:

"We guarantee that 99.9% of the time that your web site will be accessible via IP address to the world. The IP address is the numerical value equivalent to www.youractualdomain.com. If your web site is not online 99.9% of the time we will refund the percentage of your monthly hosting fees equal to the downtime."

What does this mean? If my web site is down for the whole day they will refund 1/30th of $14 (46 cents)??? Is that absurd or what?

What is a fair downtime policy?

Knowing ***** they will not refund you a penny. But I bet you that a lot of people will fight for those 46 cents.

But I think that a 99.5% uptime is good. I really don't believe many host esp. those with the 99.999999999999999999999% uptime most people are starting to use that as a marketing tool same as the 24X7 support. So if you see more then 3 9s after the decimal run as fast as you can.

Even if you were to just say plain 99% that really doesn't sound too bad. It's only like 2 or 3 days downtime a year (which might seem like quite a bit for some).

What I meant was more in terms of what's a fair compensation if the 0.1% downtime is exceeded?

I want to setup a fair downtime policy for my customers.

I think *****s "46 cents off your montly fee" per 24 hrs of downtime policy is absurd! I'm sure people lost more than 46 cents if their business site is down for 24 hrs!

I think what's more relevant now is not wether a host has a uptime guarantee policy (almost everyone does now) but what will be done if there is excessive downtime.

You can maybe give them a free month or something if it falls under your guarantee. But don't go any try to give them an arm and a leg if it happens. I know that you want to have a good policy but people take advantage of that. So a free month or something like that will be nice. But make sure that you add to your policy that reboots, god's act etc are not part of the guarantee because then people will want a free month even for a sec of downtime.

How about in terms of measuring the downtime? I know some hosts count it from the time the *customer* reports the downtime.

I just did the number and a 99.9% uptime guarantee includes 45 minutes of downtime.. If I end up with an hour of downtime on a server with 300 accounts this translates into $4000 of lost revenue which I can't afford.. There must be a more reasonable compensation?

I think a 99% uptime guarantee is more reasonable since it provides up to 7 hrs of downtime per month which you sometimes need because hardwares have to be upgraded, upstream providers sometimes fail, etc.

our uptime guarantee is 99.5%, which count to 3 hours 36 minutes of downtime every month ... We could do better, but we just offer it at 99.5% and give us more flexibility ...

Our refund policy is 5% refund of total monthly for every 0.25% (1 hour 18 minutes) of downtime afterward ...

Let me know if this is good policy or not ...

cheers,
:beer:

Originally posted by hostmaniac
I think a 99% uptime guarantee is more reasonable since it provides up to 7 hrs of downtime per month which you sometimes need because hardwares have to be upgraded, upstream providers sometimes fail, etc.

I believe the uptime guarantee does not count towards scheduled downtime due to hardware upgrade, server reboot, scheduled work on your uplink provider, etc ... Most hosts will say this in their SLA, shceduled and unscheduled downtime ...

cheers,
:beer:

Dektong, that sounds about fair to me... If you have 24 hrs excessive downtime, you have to refund 66% of the customer monthly fee. I hope I did the calculations correctly.

Another question that wonders in my head is what is to be considered a downtime? Should e-mail malfunction (which is more common than server crashes) count as downtime?

I would like to hear some opinions from web hosts on this..

I figured this all out about two months ago...I think it's all right....

99.9% = 16.8 minutes
99.5% = 3 hours, 24 minutes
99.1% = 6 hours, 31.2 minutes
98.9% = 7 hours, 4.8 minutes
98.5% = 10 hours, 12 minutes

To encourage your customer to stay with your operation, consider offering extra time instead of refunds.

an example would be if thier site falls below 99.5 % in one month, we would credit 10 days of service to the account. Now this may cause difficulty with an automated billing cycle, however we were small and were able to do this. Plus at 99.5 this rarely happened.

good luck

You might offer something on a graduated scale like what skynetweb used to offer:

< 99.9% = %15 off
< 99.5% = %25 off
< 89.9% = %50 off

I'm guessing on what percentages they were actually using, because it's not published anymore do to a change in their guarantee.

Now it looks like they just offer one week off if it drops below 99.7%

Originally posted by one_web
Knowing ***** they will not refund you a penny. But I bet you that a lot of people will fight for those 46 cents.

But I think that a 99.5% uptime is good. I really don't believe many host esp. those with the 99.999999999999999999999% uptime most people are starting to use that as a marketing tool same as the 24X7 support. So if you see more then 3 9s after the decimal run as fast as you can.

***** refunded my friend his money 4-5 months back, after he found out how bad their service was.