The real story on 99.8% guaranteed uptime

who are the best dedicated serving hosts and what to expect from them

[devitnow]

Hi Everyone,

I need to make a change with my hosting company who manages my dedicated server. My problem is all too often I'm having server downtime.

But before I jump ship, I want a feedback from other about what's realistic in terms how often a server should go down.

Is it realistic to expect from a hosting company that the server should not go down? Or if there is downtime, it's under a few minutes?

Is there anyone here who has positive experience with a hosting company where their server is never down?

I'm just trying to figure out what are normal expectations I should expect from hosting companies.

[JohnKelly]

Generally with a dedicated hosting company *you* manage your server, not them. There are a few cases of fully-manager hosting but not many.

The dedicated hosting company is responsible for server hardware, and the network. You are responsible for the server software. Often a script can cause a server to hang, but that would be your responsibility to isolate and fix.

Hardware failures can also cause server downtime, and in that instance it would be your web host's responsibility.

I mention these things since often a dedicated hosting customer assumes anythign that goes wrong with a server or it's software is the hosting company's fault, and that is not always the case. For this reason the 99.8% uptime probably is for the network, and not your server.

Hope this helps....

[devitnow]

Sorry for not being too clear in my posting. This is a fully managed dedicated server. It costs a bit more, but they take care of everything. Patch updates, fixing things, security, etc.

[abertone]

We have been with Rackspace managed server company for about 4 years now. In those 4 years, the server has gone down twice. Both times it was for a short period and we were reimbursed our fees for that month.

-ABertone

[dvduval]

I believe 99.8 amounts to about 2 hours of downtime allowed per month. You get what you pay for. Some of the big names guarantee 99.99, but they cost a lot more. I'm usually satisfied with 99.9 SLA. One thing that separates the the more sophisticated hosts from the entry level hosts is firewall system (which costs $$$). The more sophisticated hosts can more quickly deal with Denial of Service attacks on the network.

[blaze]

Consider ev1servers.net .. price is very good, performance is excellent, and reliability has been awesome so far.

[stuntdubl]

Hey all...hosting discussions tend to stray into areas that are against the TOS or forum charter [webmasterworld.com]

Let's try to keep from mentioning specific hosts, and just discuss the qualities and expectations for a good host if possible...it is a good topic of what to expect from a host.

[devitnow]

Ok, so there are people here who have managed servers that rarely if ever go down - you just have to pay a bit more. I understand that you get what you pay for, I just want to have a fair and realistic take on the level of service I should expect for my money.

I didn't know about firewall services I'll look around for that and see if my host is doing this or not.

thanks again,

devitnow