Does anybody know any hosts that can offer real 99,9% uptime in shared hosting?

I want to host a site of a friend that has paying subscribers and can't be down for more than few minutes every now and then.

Believe me the refund of a month if the host was unable to achieve the 99,9% uptime, or even a life-time free membership means nothing, comparing to the complains of 500 paying subscribers.

Php and MySQLs are needed.
Support other than keeping the server up is not required.

Any suggestions?

www.ukname.net have really nice uptime.

If you want a gurantee for something like that then you're going to pretty much have to go dedicated with someone likek RackSpace.com

Originally posted by KDAWebServices
If you want a gurantee for something like that then you're going to pretty much have to go dedicated with someone likek RackSpace.com

Is there a solution except dedicated server?

I would think a shared plan of this magnitude would carry approximately the same price as a dedicated server plan.

Is there a solution except dedicated server?Even a dedicated server is no guarantee of 99.99% uptime. In fact, given your additional responsibilities to manage the box, your uptime might even be worse! Perhaps a managed dedicated server might be an option.

But the bottom line is that machines and components and networks will have problems. You might be lucky and not suffer a failure for years. Or you might not be.

I would recommend picking a host that has demonstrated a grown up approach to service and then weigh your options with them. This means avoiding hosts with "all you can eat" policies; hosts run by a single person; hosts that charge too cheap $ for their services.

(Sorry single person hosts, while I'm certain that a number of you do a terrific job for your clients, the bottom line is that one-person operations raise risk to clients. This is not to say that firms with lots of staff can't deliver crappy results.)

Such firms will have less downtime to begin with, since they will have structured their business properly to avoid issues as much as possible. Charging a fair price for their services means they don't have to make up $ with larger volume of clients; a host should make a profit -- otherwise how are they to make investments for the future?

And when inevitable problems happen, at least you know that you aren't relying on one single cranky person ;)

I suppose you minimize risk if you go with a managed dedicated server or perhaps a 'virtual' server with only a few clients on it.

My two choices then - both well regarded - Site5.com and Pair.com.

Pair is significantly larger and is an example of a hosting company that has really focussed on eliminating as much as possible the normal problems that cause shared hosting to go down. For some clients here on WHT, Pair policies would seem onerous and unbearable, yet the policies contribute to highly stable hosting environment. For example there are serious limitations on email broadcasting. They run MySQL on dedicated MySQL servers, not a copy on each and every one of their hundreds of web servers. Check out their system notices page - most downtime is 10 minutes. http://pair.com/pair/support/notices/

Site5 is a quality smaller organization (but a number of people, not just one overworked person) that has a good reputation. I host a significant revenue producing site there on a shared server which is about to be moved over to a server of mine that Site5 will host. I do not check the site hosted there every day because I have a high level of trust in Site5 to keep their servers running. That site will soon move to my own server, co-located at Site5. I chose them for co-location again because of the trust built up over the past 14 months. PS, I'm not moving the site to a dedicated box for performance or uptime reasons - its a new custom application and I wanted complete control of the box. We'll eventually be doing other things including some streaming media.

I have used both and recommend both. You will pay more than at many of the hosts we see here on WHT making huge promises, but on the other hand, its unlikely you'll ever be down for days on end only to discover that your hosting company hasn't any backups and no money to bring up a new machine quickly (just to cite examples seen here on WHT over the past few weeks).

I think you are on a wrong approach. Downtime is often caused by the providers, no mattrer how good their are cause switches etc blow sometimes, that's life.

What you should ask is for a host that has the fastest and most effective responses to such events. And a VERY important thing is to have a host that, if there is a problem, will tell you instantly what happened and when it wil lbe online again so you can notify YOUR clients instantly too and give them facts and promises that can be kept :)

One way to do this, is to host your site on 2 different servers [with a high uptime record each] and rsync your mySQL db's and use round robbin dns

Alternately you can look for a provider that would have server mirroring with a master and a slave with IP binding and the slave server will kick up in the event the master conks

As for datacenters, well places like peak-10.com or nac.net have very high uptime

But then it all costs money

Cheers
Balaji

Well, mediatemple.net has a good rep for uptime and service
They hosts high-rep sites like k10k.net and lots of other popular sites.

If you don't have a lot of money to spend yet need virtually 100% uptime, one solution would be to get your DNS hosted by ZoneEdit with their geographically diverse DNS servers, and then sign up with 2 virtual hosting accounts.

When one goes down, ZoneEdit will automatically direct your visitors to the other server.

Of course this isn't quite the same as having load balanced servers in a redundant data center, but for the price it will provide remarkable uptime.

Originally posted by ShareFile
I think you are on a wrong approach. Downtime is often caused by the providers, no mattrer how good their are cause switches etc blow sometimes, that's life.



No, it's not life. There are a lot of things that providers can do to keep from having downtime. It's just one of those things where if you throw enough money at talent and infrastructure, can be done.

If you need someone who will give you whatever uptime you require, find someone who offers an SLA. And expect to pay a premium based on the uptime you contract for.

Http://www.venturesonline.com - They receive ALOT of good comments on this forum, actually i have yet to see anything negative. I hosted with them for a while, I suppose i saw about 2-3 minutes of downtime per month. Which is above 99.9% uptime guarantee. Definately a good company, with reliable support and network.