I was looking at shell providers and found this. I know shell places are alot different than web hosts. But, think if a web host had this for their guarantee they would get signups?


Uptime
******* will make access available to you on a best-effort basis. Service outages can occur over which we have no control. In the event that an outage lasts more than 24 hours, we will, at your request, prorate the applicable portion of your monthly, quarterly, semiannually, or yearly service charge. Although our average system uptime is outstanding, we cannot and will not make any guarantee of any kind regarding the stability or uptime of this service.

Originally posted by venomx
I was looking at shell providers and found this. I know shell places are alot different than web hosts. But, think if a web host had this for their guarantee they would get signups?


Uptime
******* will make access available to you on a best-effort basis. Service outages can occur over which we have no control. In the event that an outage lasts more than 24 hours, we will, at your request, prorate the applicable portion of your monthly, quarterly, semiannually, or yearly service charge. Although our average system uptime is outstanding, we cannot and will not make any guarantee of any kind regarding the stability or uptime of this service.

Well, it sounds honest to me. If you don't own the data center you're in how can you guarantee anything really? Too many sites post "99.9% uptime" and they're freaking resellers, as if they have any control over it.

I agree - I like it alot. Why offer something that you don't really have any control over? It's not really fair to you or the customers.

Theirs very similar to ours (feel free to borrow from it anyone):

"We will make every reasonable attempt to avoid unexpected server downtime and to ensure that all accounts are well taken care of. We cannot guarantee or predict server downtime. Any network problem, or outage, is not covered under any guarantee or warranty and will not be grounds for reimbursement for any subsequent financial damages or losses. Account backups are ultimately the account holder's responsibility.

Since 1997, websites hosted through White Lake Web/Affordable Host have had a less than 1% average downtime."

--Tina

I'm going with rackspace.com who guarantees 99.999% uptime, meaning that I, inturn can offer that to my clients.

Brian

Originally posted by BrianF
I'm going with rackspace.com who guarantees 99.999% uptime, meaning that I, inturn can offer that to my clients.

Brian

What's the reimbursement policy from Rackspace.com and what's your reimbursement policy? Just curious.

I don't have a webhost yet, its still in planning, hopefully by the end of january!

Rackspace.com:

Network Uptime

Rackspace guarantees that the network will be available 99.999% of the time in a given month (no more than 24 seconds downtime per month), excluding scheduled maintenance. Rackspace will refund the customer 5% of the monthly fee if downtime exceeds 24 seconds. Rackspace will refund the customer an additional 5% of the monthly fee for each additional 30 minutes of downtime (up to 100% of customer's monthly fee). Network uptime includes functioning of all network infrastructure including routers, switches and cabling. Network downtime exists when a particular customer is unable to transmit and receive data and Rackspace records such failure in the Rackspace trouble ticket system. Network downtime is measured from the time the trouble ticket is opened by a customer to the time the server is once again able to transmit and receive data



My policy would probably be the same. However, I'd have to think about it because they just guarantee network uptime. If after the server was configured properly and I didn't need to do many reboots etc... then I could offer something like that, maybe 99.9%.

Brian

Good luck explaining to customers that you can't gaurantee things like a downed connection 4 hops from your network. We have over 3000 customers and EVERY DAY we get at least one customer telling us "the server is down!!". Upon investigating everything at our end...we ask for a traceroute which shows that the outage isn't even NEAR us.

Of course, the customer won't believe you and will probably threaten to sue you because "You have a 99.99999% uptime gaurantee and we are losing $1000s because our site is down!!!". :)

Why set your customers up for disappointment? It's almost like offering unlimited bandwidth, in my opinion.

--Tina

Originally posted by BrianF
I don't have a webhost yet, its still in planning, hopefully by the end of january!

Rackspace.com:

Network Uptime

Rackspace guarantees that the network will be available 99.999% of the time in a given month (no more than 24 seconds downtime per month), excluding scheduled maintenance. Rackspace will refund the customer 5% of the monthly fee if downtime exceeds 24 seconds. Rackspace will refund the customer an additional 5% of the monthly fee for each additional 30 minutes of downtime (up to 100% of customer's monthly fee). Network uptime includes functioning of all network infrastructure including routers, switches and cabling. Network downtime exists when a particular customer is unable to transmit and receive data and Rackspace records such failure in the Rackspace trouble ticket system. Network downtime is measured from the time the trouble ticket is opened by a customer to the time the server is once again able to transmit and receive data



My policy would probably be the same. However, I'd have to think about it because they just guarantee network uptime. If after the server was configured properly and I didn't need to do many reboots etc... then I could offer something like that, maybe 99.9%.

Brian

Good lord, Rackshack would have refunded me my whole month this month! But last month I guess they'da kept all my money, here's hoping Jan will be another good month!

You're using rackshack though, I'm talking about RackSPACE. Maybe you knew that, I'm probably just confused =)

Brian

The numbers for using Rackspaces policy don't work real well. If they were down for 30 minutes and had to refund you 10% of your fee, and you in turn had to refund your customers 10% of their fees. Lets do some math:

> 1 server at RackSpace @ $250.00 / month = $25.00
> 100 customers on your server @ 25 / month * 100 = 2500.00 = $250 in refunds.

You lose $250.00 due to that policy. That's another server.

Now, that may not really be so bad, but it could get much worse if you had 5 servers with 200 customers per server, or 1000 customers and a refund of $25000 * 10% = $2500. Ouch! :kaioken:

Sorry about the over analysis! It's all part of my current ongoing research.

Scott

Interesting, thanks for the input.

What about just upgrading all accounts up one level? It wouldn't really hurt considering few sites use over 500 megs of bandwith. Plus, it gives the user something that they would feel is acceptable as an appology.

I'm not sure what I'd do in this case. Anyone want to figure how much time 99.5% of a month is?

30 day month = 720 hours
.995 x 720 = 716.4

720 - 716.4 = 3.6 hours.

You could guarantee 99.5% uptime monthly in this case. How likely would it be that your server would go down for 3.6 hours in one month? And if this did happen just upgrade everyones account.



BTW: If you have a server with 30gigs/transfer monthly how many users can you expect to fit on there?

Brian

Originally posted by BrianF

BTW: If you have a server with 30gigs/transfer monthly how many users can you expect to fit on there?

Brian


One that uses 30 gigs or 3 that use 10 gigs. :)

Seriously, it has nothing to do with transfer - it has to do with the server specs...especially RAM.

--Tina

Transfer is expensive!

I mean, if I offer 5 gigs of transfer in my 14.95 account or something, how many people can I expect will use the full 5 gigs, and how many will only use 400 megs. This is crucial to know how many people I can fit on a server!

Brian

Originally posted by BrianF
Transfer is expensive!

I mean, if I offer 5 gigs of transfer in my 14.95 account or something, how many people can I expect will use the full 5 gigs, and how many will only use 400 megs. This is crucial to know how many people I can fit on a server!

Brian

That is irrelevant if you are running a 300 mhz Celeron with 32 MB of RAM.

We need to know the server specs before we can honestly tell you how many customers you can fit on a server. Also, it depends on what services you are offering. If you are offering a ton of features, on a cheap machine (streaming media, 5 databases per account, etc.) - then your customers will probably use up the server resources before bandwidth ever becomes an issue.



--Tina

750mhz
2 20gig ide drives
516 megs of ram
No streaming

I haven't setup plans for db's yet.

Brian

Probably around 200 - 300 accounts. Providing these are low to medium needs accounts and don't use up alot of server resources.

--Tina

My nightmares are of me offering accounts with 5 gigs of transfer and people using all 5 of those gigs!

*shudders*

Brian

And some will. We bought a company a while back that I wish we hadn't (we have bought several so I won't reveal which one). We inherited several "deals" that we didn't know about until after the transaction was done. Imagine giving a 60GB transfer plan for $39.95 a month? Did I mention they gave this plan to someone because they were using more than the 40GB allotted previously at $29.95? You can imagine the cow I had when I discovered that one. :-(

We ended up dropping several of those clients as a result of that sort of thing. What I hate is that it made us look like the bad guys. :-(

Anyway, my point is that some will use all the of resources allotted. Some won't. What percentage is hard to determine and largely depends on your target market. For example, we have one site that targets small businesses. Those accounts do not tend to use all of their resources. We have another that targets forums and databases. A much larger percentage of those accounts DO use close to or all of their resources.

Some things for you to consider...

You usually don't 'refund' customers anyway. You typically just take if off their next bill (unless they cancel their account, at which point you'd need to refund). My point here being that you don't feel the sting as much if you haven't already re-invested the money (or thrown it away on booze ;p)

This should help you: But how does one determine if a web host's space offering is an honest one?
Ask the host what size hard drives are being used within the server and how many other accounts will be sharing the same server.


Divide the hard drive space by the total number of accounts to find the average amount of disk space available.
Let's use XYZ, Inc. as an example:
XYZ uses 73GB (73,000 megabytes or MB) hard drives in each server and average 275 accounts per server.


73,000MB / 275 accounts = 265MB per account on average.
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So with 73GB hard drives you could realistically offer accounts in the range of 100-300mb of Space and host about 275 accounts per server