Webhosting Uptime

November 1, 2004 5:25 PM

Webhosting uptime. What's reasonable to expect from at $10/month hosting package? I'm hosted by netacore and by my count, my domain has been down about six times this year, for an average of about a day at a time.

Also, why? What are common reasons for this sort of thing? And why is it almost always just 24 hours?

March 30, April 27-29, June 29-July 2, Sept 12-13, Oct 11-12, Nov 1 - ???

posted by Jeff Howard to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

if you're looking for reasonable uptime and price, i'd recommend dreamhost. They have a package for $9.95 that's pretty good. If you want crazily reliable, and are wishing to pay more for what you get, I'd recommend pair.com.

I've used both for a long time, and am very happy with both.
posted by websavvy at 5:27 PM on November 1, 2004

Also: 24 hours downtime is pretty unacceptable.

Some people select hosting providers based on price. Then they find out that their sites are unavailable because the hosting company's sole bandwidth provider is having problems. The best hosts buy bandwidth from a wide mix of providers, so that if one has problems, they have adequate capacity with the alternate connections.
posted by websavvy at 5:39 PM on November 1, 2004

I'm building a small hosting company right now, and the first thing I set up (before my business license, before my company website) was DNS failover between my two servers - one in Texas, one in SF. As a web person, uptime is important to me and it was grating how often my email was unavailable at my previous host.

SO - you should be able to find great, solid, reliable hosts for $10 a month. Since I'm not entirely up and running yet I won't plug myself - instead, I'll plug TextDrive. They rock.
posted by annathea at 5:57 PM on November 1, 2004

i pay 8 dollars a month and my site has been down 3 times for about 3 minutes each time.

whenever it was down do to server upgrades, etc, they warned me about it several weeks in advanced.

you should get better service than that (i use lunarpages btw).
posted by Stynxno at 6:15 PM on November 1, 2004

I used Netacore for a basic hosting account and a reseller account. The downtime got to be unacceptable. I recently moved my reseller account to BlueWho, and have had no problems so far.

The customer service is pretty bad, too. I believe they're run by one guy, which is unrealistic for the amount of stuff he's trying to do.

Netacore was cheap when I started with them, but $10/month for their amount of downtime, plus rotten service, is really ridiculous. It also took me four months of asking to get my reseller account cancelled.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 7:05 PM on November 1, 2004

There is no good reason for that kind of downtime. Your numbers imply that either the hardware or the network connection catastrophically failed, and there was no failover plan at all so it had to stay down until it could be fixed.

And then it happened five more times.

As far as replacements, I agree with websavvy on both of those options.
posted by smackfu at 8:08 PM on November 1, 2004

I use Host Gator and one of the things I really appreciate, besides the resonable price, is the ability to get a response 24/7 on Yahoo Instant Messenger. They are also available on ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger and the good news is that I generally never need to contact them.
posted by geekyguy at 8:54 PM on November 1, 2004

Response by poster: Thanks everyone for the reality check. If it ever comes back up, I'll have about a month to go host-shopping. I was worried that the downtime was par for the course. I just sent out resumes, and it'll be nice to count on having a working site on the other end of the URL.
posted by Jeff Howard at 8:57 PM on November 1, 2004

I host my site with these guys ($3 per month) and in three years, my site was down twice, both for about 20 minutes each. One of my friends hosts my restaurant web site and in one year, it's been down for 15 minutes.

So yes, I think you can get a lot better for your $10.
posted by madman at 9:13 PM on November 1, 2004

Jeff Howard - that's bollocks. i've been with hummingbird hosting for a couple years and my sites haven't been down once. and i only pay something like $5/pm.
posted by kv at 10:29 PM on November 1, 2004

I second Dreamhost, as noted above.

I think I saw a special they're running currently prepaying = $7.95 for mad storage and bandwidth.
posted by jeremias at 4:02 AM on November 2, 2004

I recommend Verve Hosting which has plans as low as $5 and has wonderful uptime. In, uh, four years or so that they've hosted my sites (all 23 that are currently online) there have been occasional 3-5 minute glitches (maybe once or twice a year) and one major downtime incident following a (literally) killer icestorm. Any other downtime has been announced at least 10 days in advance, and options for redundancy have been offered. Doesn't hurt that the server admin seems to live very close (perhaps in the same building) as her (yes, her) machines. Definitely worth a look.
posted by Dreama at 8:28 AM on November 2, 2004

I always recommend phpwebhosting, even though I am no longer with them. I turned to dreamhost because I got a too-good-to-pass-up deal, and I still miss phpwebhosting. dreamhost does weird things with their web control panel that i don't like, while phpwebhosting was much more straight forward with their apache config and such.
posted by Hackworth at 10:14 AM on November 2, 2004