Results 1 to 11 of 11
  1. #1
    Join Date
    Mar 2002
    Location
    Bristol, UK
    Posts
    7

    Signs of a reliable host

    How can I find a reliable host?

    <preamble>
    I am looking for a new host for a client. General requirement is Windows, 200+MB space, 5+GB/month plus some other bits and pieces

    Having read many of the postings on WHT I've come up with a shortlist of Tokios, Uplinkearth, Adehost, Powersurge, Sectorlink and Matrixresellers (feedback on any of these is welcome)

    My client wants to move because the current host, which used to be reasonably stable, has recently become unreliable, with at least 3 days' website downtime in the last couple of months plus various shorter periods of (partial) downtime

    <question 1>
    What can I do to get a reliable host, with a good chance of ongoing stability over the next 3+ years. My thoughts so far are:
    * Read experiences on WHT - done
    * Post request for experiences on WHT, especially for hosts on shortlist which haven't got a lot of feedback
    * Ask the host for information about their set up
    Any other suggestions?

    <question 2>
    What questions can I ask the host that will show their reliability? And what answers are good signs and what are bad signs?
    So far I have thought of the following items to ask about:
    * Redundancy in equipment, e.g. fallback equipment
    * Connection to the Internet, tier and redundancy
    * Backups
    * Monitoring
    * Virus and other intruder protection
    * Support (email, phone), (guaranteed, typical) response times, opening times
    * Support organisation, e.g. 1 tier, frontdesk/backroom
    * Company size, time in business
    * Company location (1 building, spread across the country e.g. due to take overs)
    What else?

    Thanks

    Coen

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jun 2002
    Location
    PA, USA
    Posts
    5,143

    Re: Signs of a reliable host

    Originally posted by CoachCoen
    <question 2>
    What questions can I ask the host that will show their reliability? And what answers are good signs and what are bad signs?
    So far I have thought of the following items to ask about:
    * Redundancy in equipment, e.g. fallback equipment
    Among all of your questions, the above will be the hard to accomplish for any host. If they do have it, then their hosting price will have to justify it.

    To start with, the host will need to have redundant providers in their network such that your data will always be routed even if one (or more) of their providers is down.

    Once it's achieved, there will still be a single point of failure, the switches/routers where the servers are being connected to. The switches/routers too need to be redundant in which any switch/router can fail yet there will be no impact at all.

    Then, the host will need to offer a mechanism to do fail-over for their webservers; in case any web server is down, there will be other web server to take over. This can be done through hardware/software implementation, and it will be very costly. The redundancy should not stop in the web servers, but also other servers (MAIL/FTP/DNS/MSSQL/etc).

    At the end, a host that capable of offering all these will have no problem guarantee you a high uptime such as 99.999% or even 100%. But, again, it will (or should) cost you quite a bit.

    However, even without this fail-over mechanism, most hosts can still offer you 99.5% uptime (less than 3 hours 26 minutes of downtime on any given month) or even 99.9% (43 minutes of downtime on any given month). If this is sufficient for you, then most hosts you mention above should be able to do this even without having any fail-over mechanism I described above. Beware of any host that offers 99.999% where they don't even have a fail-over mechanism. Most likely, it will just be their marketing gimmick and they won't even have a clue on how to deliver such a high uptime.

    Wish you the best in your search.
    Fluid Hosting, LLC - Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure: Cloud Shared and Reseller, Cloud VPS, and Cloud Hybrid Server

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Mar 2002
    Location
    Bristol, UK
    Posts
    7
    At the end, a host that capable of offering all these will have no problem guarantee you a high uptime such as 99.999% or even 100%. But, again, it will (or should) cost you quite a bit.
    Good point. I guess the occasional 30 minute downtime won't matter too much. What we're trying to avoid is 3 hours downtime (we've had too many 3+ hours downtime recently)

    Maybe a set up with 10 operational boxes and one stand-by, daily backups, so that a website can be back within a couple of hours even if a machine completely fails

    Coen

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Dec 2001
    Location
    New Jersey
    Posts
    1,152

    Re: Re: Signs of a reliable host

    Originally posted by FHDave


    At the end, a host that capable of offering all these will have no problem guarantee you a high uptime such as 99.999% or even 100%. But, again, it will (or should) cost you quite a bit.
    funny thing, everyone talks about uptimes and SLA's but does anybody ever realize what they cost to achieve. but I got to thank you for pointing out that it is not cheap to achieve.

    if you offer a SLA ( monthly ) with 99.63 uptime that 164 minutes of total down time per month to any one server on the farm.

    now I don't know about anybody else, but a full tape restore on a server takes from 120 minutes to 240 minutes ( some take up to 7 hours ). that will almost eat into your SLA's break points and cause refunding.

    or if your farm is well designed you have some load balancing / raid setup's / and clusters. ( clusters are not load balancing, simular but not the same ), but that takes some real ammount of cash.

    there are very few firms that can offer 99.999. infact I saw a request for 99.9999 in mssql just go out recently. the first quote that came around was 6 digits large ( way over 650K ) and people were saying that was cheap.

    have not see anybody with an SLA 99.90 or better ( on the SLA ) that was not atleast $20.00 for the real basic hosting.

    a decent server farm of 10 servers will cost you about 100K with all equiment. to host about 6000 accounts correctly( sla=99.9) you will need atleast 28 servers, one set of a heck of a good switch and router, 1 solid tape back up systems, a few raids.

    in unix this is cheap : Just the raids alone should cost you 12K each, the routers and load balancers should cost you about 16K to 20K, tape back up system is 18K. The rest is cheap.

    but what host out there is at this level, i don't know of any.

    Mike
    I am Mike From ADEHOST.Com, Multidomain Windows hosting with Cold Fusion and ASP and Dot.NET Also offering multi-domain Unix hosting. silently, each one should ask, Have I done my daily task. Have I kept my honor bright, can I sleep without guilt tonight. Have I done and have I did, everything, to be prepared. - our motto to maintain services.

  5. #5

    Re: Re: Re: Signs of a reliable host

    All this talk about uptime made me remember the guys who host microsoft: conxion.com They even have a little blurb on their site on how they haven't gone down in 5 years.

    there's also a bit on how they have "provided 2408 Continuous 100% Uptime Days, Since Feb 24, 1996 for ALL Conxion's FailSafe Customers - With No Exceptions!"

    thats like around 6 years now. wow. I wonder how much it costs for that sort of uptime. Definitely not cheap.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Aug 2002
    Location
    Australia
    Posts
    771
    That's amazing..

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Dec 2001
    Location
    New Jersey
    Posts
    1,152
    Originally posted by faculty
    That's amazing..
    No, that's money well spent.

    If you need that sort of uptime and High Avalibility, then you got to pay for it.

    Mike
    I am Mike From ADEHOST.Com, Multidomain Windows hosting with Cold Fusion and ASP and Dot.NET Also offering multi-domain Unix hosting. silently, each one should ask, Have I done my daily task. Have I kept my honor bright, can I sleep without guilt tonight. Have I done and have I did, everything, to be prepared. - our motto to maintain services.

  8. #8
    That's a very nice list of questions already !

    In additon you could ask them how loaded their servers are:
    - How many accounts hosted per server
    - Oversell ratio (if every customer used all of his allocation, how many times the real capacity would that be?)

    Question TO ALL: Can anyone tell what a normal value is for the "oversell ratio" I just defined? 1 would be perfect, but I guess the is a treshold higher than that up to which one can go without customers ever finding out, and another line above which things are programed to crash sooner or later.
    Stephen's Independent Hosting Provider Review
    http://hostingreview.rahn.net

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Dec 2001
    Location
    New Jersey
    Posts
    1,152
    Originally posted by v2rahn
    That's a very nice list of questions already !

    In additon you could ask them how loaded their servers are:
    - How many accounts hosted per server
    - Oversell ratio (if every customer used all of his allocation, how many times the real capacity would that be?)

    Question TO ALL: Can anyone tell what a normal value is for the "oversell ratio" I just defined? 1 would be perfect, but I guess the is a treshold higher than that up to which one can go without customers ever finding out, and another line above which things are programed to crash sooner or later.
    Hey thier v3rhan,
    the accounts to servers means nothing. what more valuable is load rate ( cpu usage ) over a 24 hour period. ( I have a full discourse somewhere on the forums about tuning servers for load performance and why domains per server mean nothing )

    keeping the loads low is the trick, spend the money and configure the servers correctly. I've kinda seen how the unix players can squeeze 1000 domains to a server without any problems, unix managed the memory so nicely.

    Mike
    I am Mike From ADEHOST.Com, Multidomain Windows hosting with Cold Fusion and ASP and Dot.NET Also offering multi-domain Unix hosting. silently, each one should ask, Have I done my daily task. Have I kept my honor bright, can I sleep without guilt tonight. Have I done and have I did, everything, to be prepared. - our motto to maintain services.

  10. #10
    Mike,

    many thanks for your comment. I'll add that criteria for server loading to my list. Just one more question: Is a plot of server load(s) over time something each host can readily provide? And is there a realistic chance they will provide it to ME if I ask for it (of course the same applies to my "oversell ratio" as well)?

    Stephen
    Stephen's Independent Hosting Provider Review
    http://hostingreview.rahn.net

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Dec 2001
    Location
    New Jersey
    Posts
    1,152
    Originally posted by v2rahn
    Mike,

    many thanks for your comment. I'll add that criteria for server loading to my list. Just one more question: Is a plot of server load(s) over time something each host can readily provide? And is there a realistic chance they will provide it to ME if I ask for it (of course the same applies to my "oversell ratio" as well)?

    Stephen
    well see I'm rather frightened of the overselling so I'm not a party to really talk about it, I understand yield management very well but in this case I back away.

    Is a host going to give you the server load plot, depends. cheap host have no insentive to give out thier numbers, expensive host don't really want the industry to know where the top of the line ( you'll see it on thier charts) I myself have no reason to publish it, I'm rather happy that I rank my server completely different, gives me the right risk ( domains hosted at a specific cpu load ) and reward ( how many income streams the server generates ). This forces me ( and the few other host that agree with my thinking ) to tune the server to the max of it's abilities.

    again is a host going to give it out, most likely not. Will a host tell you that they only have so many domains on a server, most likely it's been reduced by a few hundered ( on windows servers it';s real easy to issue a command to know the exact, I don't know on unix what the command it ).

    Mike
    I am Mike From ADEHOST.Com, Multidomain Windows hosting with Cold Fusion and ASP and Dot.NET Also offering multi-domain Unix hosting. silently, each one should ask, Have I done my daily task. Have I kept my honor bright, can I sleep without guilt tonight. Have I done and have I did, everything, to be prepared. - our motto to maintain services.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •