Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : How much downtime is too much downtime?

[Brushed-Red]

So I'm always one that gives my hosts the benefit of the doubt, but I was just curious to see from others how much downtime from one host will make you pack up your bags and leave?

[Ekin]

Any unplanned downtime is bad downtime, if it occurs and your datacenter doesn't give you an acceptable explanation - I'd start packing up.

[Collabora]

Interesting, no one has considered the time-frame involved.

For matters under their control, a shared hosting environment should easily provide over 95% each month (that's 36 hrs/month downtime). If they can't do that you've got some incompetents working for you

[foobic]

I expect a quality shared host to provide around 99.9% average, over a long period - say 6 months or more. In order to do that they'll need to achieve 99.95%-100% most months because very rare problems will occur (perhaps once a year or so) causing several hours of downtime. And I make no allowance for scheduled maintenance in this - it's better to be informed of downtime in advance but in the end the server's either working or it's not.

The hosts that can achieve that sort of uptime tend to be the ones offering more expensive, smaller plans. For a budget plan with generous disk and transfer limits I'd adjust my expectations down to around 99.5% average. And any host who delivers less than 98% over a single month (14 hours downtime) needs a good explanation and a convincing case for why it won't happen again, or I'll be leaving.

Just be careful of fake uptime "guarantees" and worthless SLAs. It really makes no difference what the host claims to offer - proven performance is what matters.

[TimothyH]

Originally Posted by foobic

Just be careful of fake uptime "guarantees" and worthless SLAs. It really makes no difference what the host claims to offer - proven performance is what matters.

I would have to agree with you, however would you stick with a host who actually honors their SLA or uptime guarantee?

[Rob]

We don't provide an uptime guarantee although our upstreams give us 100% guarantees because lets face it servers will go down at some point or another.

Maintenance is also sommet we have to factor in - like other hosts we do all we can to ensure we don't have to take sites offline. For example our servers operate hot-swap raid, dual nic's etc

Sometimes its not avoidable though but I would say between 30 - 120mins of downtime every few months is acceptable (I have very high standards).

[foobic]

Originally Posted by InstantPH

would you stick with a host who actually honors their SLA or uptime guarantee?

A guarantee without an SLA is meaningless (and arguably false advertising). SLAs are almost universally worthless. If you suffer 24 hours downtime in a month and your host (following SLA) gives you $10 credit, will that make you happy to stay?

For me the SLA is irrelevant - the host's explanation of what happened and their plans to prevent it happening again would be the main things that influence the stay / go decision.

[Crashus]

48 hours in a row is definitely too much.

[UNIXy]

How much downtime have you experienced? Any facility will have down time (unplanned). We've long accepted that failover across facilities must be part of our business continuity plan.

Regards

[AquariusStorage]

Originally Posted by Collabora

Interesting, no one has considered the time-frame involved.

For matters under their control, a shared hosting environment should easily provide over 95% each month (that's 36 hrs/month downtime). If they can't do that you've got some incompetents working for you

Holy Crap. I think I'd bounce way before 95% uptime lol. Anything under 99.5% in my opinion is totally unacceptable, even for shared hosting.

[ServerOrigin]

If it drops below 99% there is an issue.

[KMyers]

Hello,

Here is my take on Uptime. Everyone must remember that there are different reasons for downtime; planned maintenance, updates, server reboots, unplanned maintance, abuse, DDoS or DataCenter network issues.

A host should do the following

• ALWAYS inform their customers of planned maintenance, even if it only has a remote chance of client impact. It is best to e-mail all clients at least 48 hours in advanced if known.
• Have a network news page.
• Strive for 100% Uptime

[TailoredVPS]

In my personal opinion any downtime longer than 12 hours is way too much. A host should try to keep downtime to as little as possible (hopefully 0 hours).

[Collabora]

Originally Posted by AquariusADMIN

Holy Crap. I think I'd bounce way before 95% uptime lol. Anything under 99.5% in my opinion is totally unacceptable, even for shared hosting.

That's 7.2 minutes in a day. You would really change hosts if your site was down between 11:00 pm and 11:08 pm. You are the one that's crazy!

[Outlaw Web Master]

Originally Posted by Collabora

That's 7.2 minutes in a day. You would really change hosts if your site was down between 11:00 pm and 11:08 pm.

Would I bother? no probably not....but most likely my clients who don't fully understand hosting etc would and as they're the ones who help pay my food and energy bills and my mortgage, then I'd need to protect their interests online.

I get phone calls from a few clients even if I reboot the server they're on lol. Some clients must live on their webpages.

I agree 8 minutes a day doesn't sound long....however, try hanging yourself by the bollocks for a few minutes and you'll soon realise even 2 minutes is a long time mate.

owm