Should I believe all those uptime guarantees that web hosts have on their site?

[webman]

In looking at various hosts, many have uptime guarantees, some have a graphic on their site of some 3rd party company that has monitored their uptime.

Not that I'm skeptical...but are these really true and useful?

[kingofoverkill]

Webman,

You are right to be a little skeptical.

The hosts that have the 3rd party uptime monitor graphic probably are having that 3rd party monitor one of their web sites. Probably their company site. This does not guarantee the uptime of your site. Also, if you click on the graphic you should be able to go to the monitoring company's site for that host and see data on the host. The data should show you how long it has been monitored. Obviously, a host that has been monitored 1 month might be more unreliable than one monitored for 3 years. Also, the host might reset how long they have been monitored after an outage, especially if it shows their uptime as poor.

If the host looks good on the 3rd party monitoring and you sign up with them, you can also singup for a 3rd party monitoring service for your website. This way you will know the true uptime that they are delivering for you.

[TahoeWeb]

Hello,
As “kingofoverkill” has mentioned some good advice above. Being skeptical of some is calling it very safe…skeptical you should be especially if it is a 3rd party monitoring system.

I myself cannot see how a 3rd party monitoring system could even report accurately if you take the following into effect as it could help or even hurt the webhost.

1.Let’s say the 3rd party monitoring company was having problems with the servers they run or cannot “ping” the hosting server because they are bouncing all around the world due to the IP connection they have… Well that is going to report and show the host as being down, un -responsive or it could report a bad load time. Giving the hosting company a bad rate.

2. The hosting company could have the 3rd party monitoring system watching and pinging a server that could have no websites on it and only goes down for a simple re-set for a hour or so once every 6 months (6 months is a long time to go without resetting). Doing this is going to give the website host a great uptime report for the 3rd party.

With the two situations listed… The best thing to do for a real uptime report is either call the host and ask for the report ( keep in mind that if the report is embarrassing chances are they are not going to tell you the truth) or even better... contact the clients that are hosting websites on the server. You can find these people by looking at reviews. If they have no reviews listed (some hosts do not do that) you can get the IP range of the host and visit places like “my IP neighbor” and start putting in IP addys… This will spit out a list of all who are hosting on the various IP ranges.

When you are looking at these hosting places you should find out if the uptime is for the network or is it server. You are going to have to read the small print in the company TOS. When a host claims 99.9% people always think or assume that the website they own is going to be up 99.9% and this is when that “small print” comes into effect and they see the guarantee refers to network, not the actual server.

[kingofoverkill]

TahoeWeb,

You make some additional great points. I like your advice on how to contact other web sites that are hosted and simply ask them about uptime.

[kingofoverkill]

Another consideration for uptime is how much downtime is actually allowed per month for a certain percentage of uptime (for example, 7.2 hours for 99% uptime). Here is a nice table that shows this in seconds, minutes and hours:


Uptime% Down% Seconds Minutes Hours
99.00% 1.00% 25,920 432.00 7.200
99.50% 0.50% 12,960 216.00 3.600
99.90% 0.10% 2,592 43.20 0.720
99.95% 0.05% 1,296 21.60 0.360
99.99% 0.01% 259 4.32 0.072
99.995% 0.005% 130 2.16 0.036
99.999% 0.001% 26 0.43 0.007

[kingofoverkill]

Here is a monitoring company that has multiple monitoring nodes - www.host-tracker.com (http://www.host-tracker.com) . You can pay to be monitored every 30 minutes, 10 minutes or 1 minute. If the node that is monitoring your sites shows a problem, all other monitoring nodes are checked. This is a nice way to make sure it is not just the monitoring company's internet connectivity issue. However, this also points out another flaw in the system if you choose a 10 minute or 30 minute interval, then there could be several minutes of downtime that are not detected. So, if a host was down for 20 minutes, but those were between the checks every 30 minutes, the monitoring service would report no downtime.