Forum Moderators: phranque
The 99.99% uptime refers to only a few hours out of the year, and if they're down for an entire day (or two), their 99.99% stats are shot.
What do you plan on doing with the statistics, if and when you add a monitoring service?
Failing that, why not write a small script that returns a minimal (but changing) web page, and repeatedly call that script from your client to see when the site is unavailable?
Matt
Much better to simply research the question heavily, there are only a handful of good hosters in the usa, especially for shared hosting. Simple formula: you can't deliver service that you aren't charging for. So too cheap means can't be true. Unfortunately it's also not true that you get what you pay for, I've used lots of expensive hosting plans that sucked over the last few years. But research will guide you to the good ones, there are so few that it's really not that hard to find them.
There are more freeBSD/Linux quality hosters than Windows IIS hosters, it's simple economics coupled with the technical superiority of the apache type hosts and unix based oses when it comes to web serving. I have never found a quality windows shared hoster, although I'm sure there are a few out there.
I just need to test how many time is my domains are ok on actual hosting companies (several)
Once I decided to step off the apparently eternal bad hoster merry go round, it took me a few weeks of research before I finally started understanding what a good hosting company is.
Almost all, if not all, 'hosting review' sites are total fakes, for example. I fell for that same thing about 6 years ago. It's very obvious when you find real reviews by real people, and the hosters they recommend are the real ones. Why? Because there are so few hosters out there that are any good it's pretty easy to find them once you know what to look for.
While you can get useful information from hosting forum sites, it's extremely difficult to figure out which posters are pushing garbage and which are actually recommending good hosting, so using those is not that useful unless you already know how to weed out garbage hosters. You also need to know what the people are looking for and consider 'good'. A lot of gray/black hat seos, for example, consider hosters 'good' when they let them do their blackhat stuff without hassling them. And are super cheap. That's not what I consider good, in fact, it's what I consider bad, one of many factors.
You'll figure out what the real checkpoint items are in a few years though, but you'll probably have to go through some more bad experiences before you do.
I'll give some hints: urchin stats are expensive to license per box. I've never seen a high end hoster offer those on shared packages without making sacrifices elsewhere. And believe me, we've looked, and tried one after the other.
Same for windows hosting, fewer sites per box, higher license fees per box. I have never seen a high quality windows shared hoster. They may exist, I simply have not been able to find one, and I looked for about 1/2 a year. I couldn't even find anyone that could recommend one.
Must own their own datacenter. Don't be fooled by lies and misleading statements. These datacenters must have redundant data pipes going into them. All higher end hosters do this, and tell you they do it. But that's not all you have to look for, it's just one component.
Use google, search for <hoster name> problems. Webmasters always post about issues. That's how I found the good ones, they simply do not have any meaningful complaints about them. The bad ones, on the other hand, have entire websites dedicated to them.
Another hint, somebody complaining about a hoster not allowing them to run their forum on shared when it gets too much traffic isn't a negative, it's a positive, it means that the hoster actually watches the boxes to make sure all shared accounts are able to run well.
These are dead giveaways:
1. too much bandwidth allowed
2. unlimited bandwidth
3. too much diskspace given
4. unlimited anything
One very large and well known hosting company offers something like 500 gigabytes of bandwidth a month, which means that if it were true I could mirror my favorite linux distros for a few dollars a month. But it's not true, it's a total lie.
use google, search, keep searching until you find the real ones. Look at the companies that use them. Although WebmasterWorld's hoster doesn't do shared, it's a good example, there's a reason brett uses them, it's because they are very good.
