What Your Web Host is Not Telling You about 100% Uptime

February 3rd, 2010 by Jeff P.

In a perfect world your website would be available all day, every day, completely without fail. In reality, downtime happens. Hosting providers like to guarantee uptime, but what does that really mean? Here are three things your hosting provider isn’t telling you about 100% uptime:

#1 – Uptime is your responsibility, too.

When you talk about uptime, you mean that your site is available to your audience. When a hosting provider talks about uptime, they mean network uptime, and possibly hardware availability if you are using shared resources instead of dedicated servers.

In a dedicated hosting environment, device availability and fault tolerance are your responsibility. If a hard drive fails, did you purchase a RAID configuration to protect yourself? Did you elect to build out a database cluster? Redundant firewalls?

Application availability is also affected by your developers. In many cases, changing a single file can drop your site off the radar, even though the pipes are live and the hardware is functional. Do you have a separate development area to prevent this kind of thing from happening? What controls do you have in place to make sure that only stable edits are pushed live?

#2 – Downtime happens. There is no preventing it.

No matter what safeguards are in place, downtime is inevitable. Even if just the few seconds it takes for failover to kick in, there’s bound to be brief periods of inaccessibility to your site. A 100% uptime guarantee just means that you’ll be compensated in some way for an inevitable outage. Every hosting company expects to honor their uptime SLA occasionally.

A reliable system may have 99.9% uptime (three 9s), and every extra “9” (99.999%, for example) is exponentially more expensive to attain. This being the case, it’s up to you to decide how much uptime is worth the investment. Is it really worth the extra expenditure in infrastructure to gain an extra few minutes of availability per year? That depends on how much money you could be losing in those minutes. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer.

#3 – Downtime isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Regular preventative maintenance that occurs during a scheduled window of downtime can prevent hours of unexpected outage. Planning ahead for downtime forces you into a best practice habit of coping with outages gracefully. Set up a separate “downtime” page that informs users of the status of outage and expected time until the system is back online. Warn users of maintenance windows well in advance. Map out ideal times for maintenance, when the least number of users will be affected.

The question shouldn’t be: “What can I do to eliminate downtime?” which is impossible. Rather, ask yourself if you’re allotting enough planned downtime to prevent unplanned outages.

Conclusion

If uptime is a serious concern, don’t just go looking for a host with a 100% uptime guarantee. Do your part by trying to put a dollar figure on how much downtime will cost you and invest that money into appropriate infrastructure, which can include fault tolerant devices, separate development servers, and a proper maintenance plan. A good hosting provider will talk you through all of these points, not just promise 100% network availability.

To learn more, inquire with INetU about high availability solutions.