Webhosters down for 8+ Hours

[Frank_Rizzo]

Datacenter goes offline around midday GMT. It's now 20:00 and it's still not back up.

The webhosters main site is not available so unable to find out what's going on. Haven't tried the phone yet (it's probably queued up).

1. When is the time to start getting worried?

2. What is the longest time any decent webhoster has been offline (and came back up i.e. didn't go bust or something)

3. What the heck do you do when you can't access your site for a long period of time? Stay up all night drinking coffee or go to the pub?

4. If a webhoster offers a 99.95% uptime guarantee how many hours do I have to go before claiming a refund!

5. How long will SE's keep trying a site before giving up? Is there a threshold in hours or days where they drop a site from future crawling and from sending searchers to the site?

6. When your site goes down don't you just hate all those emails from regulars "Hey, is your site down?"

[edited by: Frank_Rizzo at 7:55 pm (utc) on Feb. 2, 2007]

[Frank_Rizzo]

Backup after around TEN hours!

[cmarshall]

If a webhoster offers a 99.95% uptime guarantee how many hours do I have to go before claiming a refund!

Here's where numbers become "weasel numbers."

If your site is up for four years continuously, then that is 35,040 hours. 0.05% of that is 17 hours or so.

[vincevincevince]

Read the uptime details carefully. They normally exclude things outside of the control of your host, i.e. if you are buying shared hosting within a bigger datacenter which has problems then that time is not included.

[weeks]

I've had this problem, too. Stuff happens. How they handle it will tell you if they are professionals or goofs. Be cool, wait and watch and listen very carefully before and after they get back up. Then you'll know what you've got. Take any actions necessary. In my case, it was clear no action was necessary. But, in your case this very well may be a clear signal it's time to move.

Let us know when you get up and what they said.

[percentages]

If their sales or tech support sites are down for more than 1 hour they don't know what they are doing and you should move immediately.

If your site is down for more than 1 hour and their support staff haven't diagnosed the problem, you should move immediately.

If the problem is known within the hour, and they tell you it will take 24 hours to fix, you should move hosts immediately. If they tell you it is a hardware fault and will be fixed within 4 hours.......I say okay.....it can happen and give them another chance!