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Thread: Whats Acceptable Downtime
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08-04-2007, 08:58 AM #1Junior Guru Wannabe
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Whats Acceptable Downtime
I know the answer is obviously zero, but what is the acceptable downtime that should be tolerated by hosting companies.
I'm with 4dhosting.co.uk and every week we have major downtime of over 12 hrs per period.
I'm only on a reseller package with this company, but i have 50 websites (all small one man companies) with them.
I haven't received an email (including spam) through any of 7 domains i have personally set up and going through this hosting. Since 21.24pm last night, it is now 13.45pm today not one email, and i have sent testers to my self form hotmail etc, none going in, and none going out, but outlook says send and receive completed as if the server is empty.
I usually receive an email every min or less, as one of the domain names has a catch all account.
Over last Xmas, websites and emails were down for 6days solid and he blamed huge spam increase crashing the systems, but most of my clients didn't notice as it was Xmas, except one who then left me for this exact reason.
Over the last 24 months i have lost 6 clients, 3 major ones
www.isleofwightcheese.co.uk
www.robertusherphotography.com
www.nutriculture.com
I am pulling my hair out, what can i do apart from leaving them, as file transfers, setting up databases, FTP accounts and emails on all those domains and then showing the clients how to fix their settings on Outlook etc is going to be a nightmare.
Any help or guidance will be gratefully accepted.
Regards
IanPlease visit http://www.quicktimevirtualreality.com as this is my little baby. Thanks
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08-04-2007, 09:08 AM #2Web Hosting Master
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Ian,
Those numbers are completely unacceptable. You should be aiming for 99.9% or higher, leaving you at 40 minutes or less per month of downtime.
Obviously, the less the better & most providers should easily be able to reach much higher than that on a monthly basis. 99.9% uptime is only about 12 hours of downtime per year in total. Mmm, if that's occurring on a monthly basis: move.
It is obviously having a major effect on your business as a whole, your clients are beginning to lose trust in yourself as well. It sounds like your provider is running a hobby shop -- 6 days of downtime for some "spam", ha. I've seen providers with less downtime as a result of servers lighting on fire.
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08-04-2007, 09:40 AM #3Web Hosting Master
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I agree with David on this 12 hours of down time every week is totally unacceptable. Good hosts range in the area of 99.9% to 99.99% for the most part.
Now for moving what control panel do they use? If it is cPanel for example most cPanel hosts will restore cpanel backup files for you without a charge. So you would not need to setup accounts again or anything of that nature.█ Tony B. - Chief Executive Officer
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08-04-2007, 09:51 AM #4Web Hosting Master
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"Every week downtime" is not acceptable one. You don;t have to have downtime more than few times a year and it must not be significant at all. I know many decent hosts who can afford to invest in good network so all other odvantages of theirs worth very little.
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08-04-2007, 10:09 AM #5Mr. Awesome
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The fact that you said, "he blames huge spam increases"... means that your current host is a one-man operation?
If so, then it is not surprising there is so much downtime. What if "he" is having a poop when your server dies? He won't even know about it for at least a few minutes.. and unless he's got a terminal in the shower, you better hope he doesn't like long showers.
And pray he does not have a girlfriend who doesn't like being interrupted during copulation.
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08-04-2007, 12:06 PM #6Newbie
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Well agreed. A host should never be down specially when its a business your running and they are serving business customers. 98ish% is acceptable but really 100% would be great.
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08-04-2007, 12:44 PM #7Web Hosting Master
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Agreed. 99.9 is a number to shoot for for sure; BUT mainly, regular downtime is never acceptable (like every week--sheesh!)
Any good data center has a 4 hour maximum SLA for catastrophic hardware failure (the server totally fries) less if it's just a disk or something, and that's a hardware issue... so something is wrong with this set-up somewhere.
He blames it on spam??? He doesn't have anti-spam of some sort to just bounce it all
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08-04-2007, 01:28 PM #8Web Hosting Evangelist
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Httpme has poor uptimes - from when I was searching their uptime records. Especially for the price you'd be paying.
Now back to the original post, 12 hours per period, is totally unacceptable and ridiculous to say the least.
Most hosts will display 99.9% uptime, which works out to 42 mins per month. But make sure the downtime is server and not network. If they are sayin network, ask for server uptime and make sure their is some sort of credit or consumption if the uptime is below 99.9% or whatever uptime you find acceptable.
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08-04-2007, 01:29 PM #9Junior Guru Wannabe
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Ive Just been sent this through the support ticket system (the time here now is 18.30pm, 21hrs after it all stopped working)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted On: 04 Aug 2007 03:28 PM
Hello,
Our apologies for the downtime as our mailserver has had a critical software issue occur overnight. We are working hard to resolve this, please be patient as we work to solve this error.
Best Regards,
John
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And yes, I'm still not getting any emails, its now been 21 dam hours!!!!
Just for the record I DON'T recommend www.4dhosting.com in any form what so ever, and for some stupid reason i have been with them since 2003. But in their defence, they were superb then and I never had any issues until 18 months ago, but they never stop having problems now.
The server i have is a windows server with Helm and yes before you all start harping on about windows vs Linux, i know all that story but like i said, its the emails that's the issue, not the server.
But about 30% of my sites are MSSQL and ASP, so i haven't the choice really.
I use a WHM and Cpanel VPS regular from an agency i work for, and i have to say Helm is light-years ahead in user friendliness.
I hate the fact you have to keep signing in and out all the time to access different accounts (unless there is something i have missed), it drive me nuts and file permissions on a Linux is even more annoying, especially when working with Joomla which uses a lot of self installers, which then prevents you from having access.Please visit http://www.quicktimevirtualreality.com as this is my little baby. Thanks
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08-04-2007, 01:32 PM #10WHT Addict
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Ouch, this is obviously affecting your business. 12 hours plus of downtime on a monthly basis is not acceptable.
If I were in your position I would be looking for a different provider or looking at getting my own server.█ PrimeHost Inc. - Canadian Web Hosting PrimeHost.ca - Canada's Prime Web Host
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08-04-2007, 01:40 PM #11Junior Guru Wannabe
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NEWSFLASH!!!!!
My emails are working again.
I only know this as i just received the subscription email to Icecreams reply above.
I haven't received any of the other emails, so i would imagine they are lost for ever in the 4D hole of hell.
I think i will need to take your advice, and look for another hosting company.
Been looking at www.solidhost.com, any experience or reviews about these guys.
As not found any negative feedback through here about them.Please visit http://www.quicktimevirtualreality.com as this is my little baby. Thanks
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08-04-2007, 01:45 PM #12Web Hosting Master
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I hate the fact you have to keep signing in and out all the time to access different accounts (unless there is something i have missed),█ Shared Web Hosting - Reseller Hosting - Semi-Dedicated Servers - SolusVM/XEN VPS
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08-04-2007, 01:46 PM #13Web Hosting Master
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High uptime is a must but downtime is a fact of life. To get true 100% uptime the costs would be astronomical.
We have a 99.5% uptime guarantee but obviously strive for better. I don't think you can honestly expect a host to fulfill a 99.99% promise but I do agree that 12 hours a pop is a huge number unless there were some catastrophic failures at the datacenter.
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08-04-2007, 01:52 PM #14Texas Female
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Well clearly you've had enough problems that you SHOULD BE researching other providers at this point.
I agree with others that the downtime is UN-acceptable.
Your upstream is a reflection of "you"
Your choice though.HostCaters.com - Quality Web Hosting - Under A Gig! - Since 1999
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08-04-2007, 04:08 PM #15Web Hosting Master
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standard uptime is 99.9%, with Failover hosting should be 100% but it is too early for market to guarantee that.
The rest companies who is offer 99.99% they simply lie about the uptime.
To get true 100% uptime the costs would be astronomical.Explore our outstanding VPS choices tailored to your budget, and we welcome reasonable offers.
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08-04-2007, 05:07 PM #16Web Hosting Master
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08-04-2007, 05:22 PM #17Web Hosting Master
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The reason why it would be atronomical is due to the costs of getting a truly redundant sytem. There are so many things that are out of the web hosts hands when it comes with providing a website for a customer that you simply can not guarantee 100%.
At that rate we'll have hosts popping up with unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth and 100% uptime all for U$1.99 per annum.
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08-04-2007, 07:09 PM #18WHT Addict
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You can never guarantee uptime you should state what it has been rather than what you expect it to be. 99.99% sounds acceptable to me but I know a lot of hosts who say that but do not have it.
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08-04-2007, 07:12 PM #19Web Hosting Master
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Well you can guarantee uptime in that you will reimburse the user. For instance we do guarantee uptime and offer 40% of the bill back if the the downtime exceeds the guarantee.
So it's basically telling the user that you are so commited to your uptime that if you don't meet the required downtime you will pay him back.
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08-04-2007, 08:05 PM #20Devil's Advocate
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hmm....
I would suggest looking in the "hosting offers" section and get a new reseller account as quickly as possible, because it might not be too much longer before more if not all your customers lose faith with all the downtime you're experiencing.
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08-04-2007, 08:49 PM #21Web Hosting Guru
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I would suggest looking for a new host, downtime every week for extended period probably means that there are more problem that they can control.
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08-04-2007, 10:28 PM #22Retired Moderator
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To get true 100% uptime the costs would be astronomical.
However, given the pricing structure at 4dhosting, they should be able to afford the necessary technology and manpower to maintain very high levels of uptime. The kind of issues that the OP has dealt with are hardly acceptable, even in a budget hosting environment.
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08-05-2007, 04:29 AM #23Powered By Customers
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First, " I'm with 4dhosting.co.uk and every week we have major downtime of over 12 hrs per period." What are you waiting for? You should move as soon as possible.
Also once you migrate sites smoothly, you don't have to worry about client's OutLook setting. They should able to use it without problem.iHubNet Ltd - Premium Hosting Solutions 4 ALL
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08-05-2007, 07:41 AM #24Junior Guru Wannabe
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Many years ago, we tried using the mailserver normal name mail.newworlddesigns.co.uk for example, but it didn't work, so 4D advised we use truewebmail.co.uk instead which is their mail server name.
So all of our clients are set up on 4Ds mail server name, not the normal one, so if (i mean when) we move, we will have a catastrophic issue with changing all the email accounts for everybody on each website.
One company has over 30 users on each of their own PC!
I received this this morning form the MD, but its the only email i did receive this morning mind you, as they are no longer working again!
Hi Ian,
I apologise you were having issues for so long - The email servers in particular Merak have been a thorn in our side but due to the way HELM/Merak works it has been very hard to migrate away from the platform but we will be completing this during the next week.
All new emails should have been coming through since around 4pm yesterday and historical email will be restored today as they are on the storage server we use for mail but Merak can't access it.
It would appear Merak throws random errors and problems at certain levels of mail loading which we reach at random intervals, largely due to spam, and these errors have caused the issues you experienced yesterday.
We will be completing the migration away from Merak during the next 7 days so these issues should be behind us.
David.
http://www.4dhosting.info/viewforum....daf3a2b256b8ec
Even on his support site, which you can all see above, it says about how he will be doing this that and other, which has never happened.
It also says about the problems i had yesterday, which is great, as it proves I'm telling the truth and not just being malicious towards his company.
Has anybody heard of www.solidhost.com and if they are any good, or at least any bad stuff?Please visit http://www.quicktimevirtualreality.com as this is my little baby. Thanks
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08-05-2007, 08:18 AM #25Web Hosting Rockstar
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Hmmm.... you sure it's not a DNS issue? If a message is recieved locally but not externally - that could point to a DNS issue.
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