Downtime

How much is reasonable?

[vivalasvegas]

Hi,

For the first time I'm using a site uptime checker to see how reliable is this new host I have for one website. The tool checks my website every half hour and since April 1st there were 5 downtimes totalling about 5 hours. How reasonable is this? I really don't know what to expect. I'm sure not happy with the situation. The host in question is a small one with low cost packages ($3/month). Would getting a higher priced package help?

Thanks

[stajer]

The answer to this question really depends on how much revenue/profit you are losing during those 5 hours.

But, I would say that amount of downtime (5 hours in 19 days) is excessive. These days you should be able to get 99.9% (AKA: Three Nines) availability for a reasonable price. That is less than 30 minutes of downtime in 30 days.

Many strive for Five Nines (99.999%) availability. Personally I have found that will cost far more than any money I could make in those 20 minutes a month. Especially if you can focus your downtime to your slowest hours.

[LifeinAsia]

You're certainly not going to get a guaranteed uptime of 99.999% for only $3/month. For only $3/month, I would say your 98.9% uptime was not unreasonable (unless they are promising something different). Invest some money in a real hosting package.

[vivalasvegas]

This website is new so it doesn't make any money yet. But I want it to make money so I want it to be online. I'm a little confused with all the hosting plans available: they all seem to offer much more space, data transfer and features than I need. That's why I chose this $3 plan. It's unclear to me why more renowned hosting providers don't offer smaller plans. Why signup for a plan providing 2 gb diskspace when I only need 20 mb.

[stajer]

When you sign up for hosting, you are not really paying for space - hard drives space is a commodity. It is not a significant cost difference to offer you 10mgs or 2 gigs.

You are really paying for bandwidth and uptime - both are expensive for hosting providers to provide. If your $3 account is offline that many hours a month, my guess is upgrading to a more expensive plan on the same host won't improve your uptime. You need to find a more reliable host entirely.

But, you are right - the reliable ones do not offer the $3 plans.

[vivalasvegas]

Thanks, after reading many reviews I signed up with a new host. I'm now paying $10/month and hopefully will enjoy better service.