If you have ever researched alternatives for hosting your website, you have probably come across statements such as “99.5% Uptime – guaranteed!”.
If you see “99.5% fat free” on the side of your yoghurt, you’d think “great!”, but “99.5% uptime” is not very good at all.
How many minutes/hours of downtime a year can you expect? Here’s the calculation:
(1-0.995) x 365 x 24 = 43.8 hours of downtime per year!
Would you be happy if your web developer told you upfront that you can expect your website to be down/broken/unavailable-to-your-customers, for almost 2 days in the coming year? I don’t think so.
But it’s the reality.
Infact, many providers actually perform worse than that, but they expect you not to notice because you aren’t looking at your own website all day, every day.
Even 99.9% uptime is almost 9 hours a year.
And if one of your customers notices your website is down, are they going to email you to tell you? Unlikely. In fact, they’ll probably think their own internet connection is to blame!
So what can you do? Is there such a thing as “100% uptime”?
I’ve seen a few US based web hosting companies offering “100% uptime”.
How can they offer 100% uptime?
They say they have backup web servers that kick in automatically if the primary servers go offline.
I used one such web host for 2 years, but my websites went dead many many times. 100% uptime is bullocks.
I was even talking to one of their technicians on the phone when they were down and he told me “they are working fine for me, there’s no problem at our end!”.
They can get away with this because there are so many links in the chain between the web server and the person loading that webpage in their browser. If something goes wrong anywhere along that chain, your website will be dead, but it might not necessarily be the web hosts fault.
How can you improve your uptime?
By simply choosing a webhosting company in the same country as your primary web visitors.
For example, if your primary web audience is New Zealanders, host your website in New Zealand.
Seems kind of obvious, but many people choose US based web hosts because they are so cheap.
This works because it reduces the number of links (routers/”hops”) in the chain. With fewer links in the chain, the chance of a router failing is reduced.
(If you’re interested, you can run a “traceroute” for your website to see how many links there are between your web server and your customers using this cool visual US based traceroute – however because this tool is US based, your results will be a little distorted because the traceroute programme will use US servers! – I couldn’t find a NZ based equivalent to show you, sorry).
I used a US hosting provider for all my clients websites up to the beginning of 2008 because it was so fantastically cheap but my clients paid the price with slow loading times and occasional downtime.
Then I changed to the NZ based webhost Ramsu, which is well priced and provides my clients with faster load times. Sadly, we still have to put up with occasional downtime. It’s just the way it is, computers are unreliable, it’s a fact.
Speaking of faster loading time, it has just become much more important. Google recently announced that load time is now a factor in it’s search engine ranking decisions.
How can you choose between NZ hosting providers?
Most of the time your web host is dictated by your web developer.
They will choose one that offers them:
- a good profit margin (the difference between what their wholesaler cost is and what they charge you, the client, per month)
- the features that they need to run the websites they build (every web developer has their own quirks and style and sometimes they need special web server settings)
And that’s about it really. Were you expecting “fast customer service” on that list? Sorry to disappoint you.
It’s easy for a web developer to get stuck in a rut with their choice of web host. It is super painful and time consuming to change web developers (things inevitably break during the move), so web developers will put up with a lot of shit before they pack up everything and move all their clients websites somewhere else.
If your choice of web host is up to you, then you will have to ask around. You’ve heard my opinion about Ramsu. Just make a decision. And it if doesn’t work out, I hope your website is simple enough to allow you to move it somewhere else.
I’ve heard mixed reviews about Maxnet, Iserve, Xtra, OpenHost, WebDrive, Net24, WebFarm. What do you use?
I guess the best webhost is one that you never hear from, and never have to talk to, or submit a support ticket to, because it just works like it’s suppose to.
Are you changing your website hosting provider right now?
I may be able to save you some headaches down the road, give me a call today on (07) 575 8799 for more free advice.
- Sheldon.
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