Is 99% Hosting Uptime Enough?
- 20 Comments
- By Zac Johnson on May 30th, 2009
When you see a 99% guarantee, it’s usually a good thing. However, when you are running an online business that is running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year… you can’t afford to be down even just 1%? While 99% seems like a high number, the chart below really puts things into perspective at how long your sites or landing pages could be down over the course of a year.
It’s one thing if you have a blog or web site that is down, but the serious money is if your sales and landing pages are down. Not only can you lost money on paying per click, but there is almost no chance of that visitor coming back.
So what can you do? There are a lot of web hosting providers that gaurantee 99.99% uptime, but even in those rare moments when your site is down, there are also services available that can notify you once your site goes down.
I just recently got setup with ObservePoint, which monitors and notifies you when your sites go down. This week I was also doing some server work and transferred this blog and a few others sites to new servers. During the process, this site was down momentarily and I was notified by ObservePoint. An example of their notification system is shown below.
ObservePoint is just one of many web site monitoring services available. You can search google for “hosting downtime” and you will see a ton of different services. What I liked best about ObservePoint was I didn’t have to install anything on the server, and it was setup almost instantly. This may sound like a sales page, but ObservePoint doesn’t even know I wrote about this… just satisfied with their service and thought it would make for an interesting post on downtime issues.
If you’ve ever had an issue with downtime, or your site had a problem and no one bothered to tell you about it, a monitoring system can easily pay for itself in no time. OP also is offering a 7 day trial for anyone interested.
- Posted in Web Developement
"With great power comes great responsibility".... my Uncle Ben told me that. Haha, just kidding! I'm Zac Johnson and I've been making money online for over 10 years now. In short, I started making money online while I was in high school... but my passion for marketing and making money goes back way earlier than that. I created ZacJohnson.com to help motivate you to start making money online, and live the life the you always dreamed of.
I’m glad you wrote this article, Zac. I used to work on a large government high availability network. I’m shocked today how many otherwise ’sharp as a tack’ marketers and other entrepreneurs accept what is actually quite poor service. The same guys who would have a coronary meltdown if, say theur bank overcharged them ten cents a month, think nothing of service providers who actually steal way more than pennies in terms of lost opportunity money. Once you start making a few thousand a month or so, you don’t just need a good server, you need a backup server and software to fail over automatically.
If you were say doing $6,000 a month, on average a 99.9% availability will cost you over $318.00, each and every month. really think you can’t afford a backup?
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I need a website hosting company who has also great customer support and whose service is impeccable. Philippine setting.
Zac, I’ve been using this uptime service for years. You can monitor an unlimited number of URLs and it’s 100% free! (No joke!)
http://uptime.openacs.org/uptime/about.adp
Glad to see it wasn’t a glitch that had your site down. Transferring servers is a @#%. I get notifications as well, but it is usually the ISP that loses connectivity and sets the router & modem into a tizzy.
A down site drives customers nuts. I didn’t even think about the whole cost & lost part if you had Ads out there driving traffic.
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I had all of my sites go down for 2 days while I was on vacation last year, cost me hundreds so I could have used a service like this. Do they offer mobile updates?
Steve
When 99% gets put into perspective in this manner it is quite sobering indeed! If you are running a serious web-based enterprise 3.6 days worth of downtime a year is just not acceptable! I just can not believe how bad a 99% rating actually is!
Yes I didn’t realize that 99% was this bad either. Basically any website host can fool customers by bragging of at least 99% uptime when it is really a low number. If you rely on search engine rankings, it is must to avoid all downtime. The search engines don’t like sites on unreliable servers. If it happens too often, you can drop in rankings significantly.
Thanks for the referral. Seems like ObservePoint is worth looking into.
99% up time is definitely not enough as evident by your chart. @Steve, I don’t know if they do offer mobile uploads as I don’t see it on their website, but mobile uploads would be a fantastic feature to offer sure. Especially like you said you were on vacation for 2 days, so imagine if you were on vacation longer..a mobile upload would have been a life saver.
Till then,
Jean
Whoa, I never actually realized that.
My server says it has a 99% uptime and I totally thought it seemed like a lot but now that I think about it it isnt.
Hmmm….
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Sounds like a great service. Specially if you are selling something online. Which as of now means I don’t qualify for.
If only these monitoring sites can provide premium accounts for free
-Mike
I’ve never had an issue with downtime. But I’ll take a look at Observe Point system, It looks interesting.
Downtime is a huge issue and I never realized how much difference even a 10th of a percent can make. You have to be really careful who you host your company with because some are even lower than 99 percent most of the times.
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Thanks for helpful referral, thanks!
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I like your simple chart presentation as it helps me understand how “downtime” affects our website’s possible earnings. ObservePoint worth checking into. Thanks!
If we do not have to do anything to get their service than I must say that this is really good option. Because having one more task in hand is never advisable.
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@Jeremy:
@used tires:
Hello !
This is Gary Livingston with ObservePoint. You mentioned mobile uploads. Are you refering to text alerts? We do offer mobile texting alerts. When an offer you’re promoting goes down or it is loading too slow we will alert you immediately via text message and there is no extra cost for that. We also send out email alerts. If you were looking for more capabilities I would love to your thoughts.
Thanks !
Gary
keep it up this nice post…………
This site is really nice. It is very interesting to know when your site is up and when it is down.Thanks for sharing this