How much uptime to expect from a shared hosting provider?

[fretfull]

The hosting provider I use is generally good. The pages load quickly. There are no brown outs where my site goes down for a few seconds or minutes. But when it does go down, it goes down for 6-8 hours. The problem is they run their drives too close to full capacity so when someone uses up a lot of diskspace all of a sudden, the file system corrupts and they have to shut everything down for a multi-hour FSCK. This has happened 3 times in the last 6 months. Which means their uptime is still 99.9%+. The websites that keep track of hosting uptime rate them as better than the industry average. Which is still hard to take when your site is down for 6 hours straight. I rather it go down for a minute here an there more frequently.

Is this reasonable uptime or should I shop for another provider?

[tangor]

Only you can answer that. If near 100% uptime and sufficient redundancy is a requirement, then you may have to look at more expensive (and larger) options.

Are these outages during your "day" or "best servicing time"? If so that can be an issue. If these are off hour (generally), might not be much of an issue.

How much history do you have on these events?

[fretfull]

I've been on the same provider for years. The first multi-hour outage was a year ago. Then it was fine for the first 6 months of this year. Since then it's happened 3 times. Once though the morning, I don't know when it started. Another time right through the middle of the day. This last time it was midnight to dawn. None of which is good but the one in the middle of the day was worst.

I don't like the increasing pattern. After the second one I had them move my site to a different server hoping that would fix the problem. Then this last outage happened.

I guess my question is what should I expect from a shared hosting provider these days. Is this about as good as it gets? If it is, then it is what it is. If not, then maybe I should start shopping for another one.

[tangor]

You have to make the decision. If a pattern is emerging that will impact your site in a bad way you will need to move.

Shared hosting, by definition, is tied to every other customer of that host and their traffic, too.

Dedicated is a bit more expensive but generally avoids these kind of problems PROVIDED the host is robust in the first place.

You get what you pay for.

As to when you make this choice my only suggestion is to start looking for options NOW before it becomes unbearable, vet the new option for time and service, reviews, etc., and be prepared to make the transition by maintaining a mirror of your site (local machine or cloud) so that the transition, 24-48 hour delay during the move and name servers changing pointers world wide, and go from there.

Then again, you might contact your current host with your concerns and ask what their future plans might be ... they could be on the verge of expanding their infrastructure and might be the best thing since sliced bread after that!