How often does your site go down?

I know that some people who using free or cheap web hosting packages they could face with downtime sometimes. I think that it's important to improve this by paying a little more for your web hosting to guarantee up time better, even 99%. I also like it when web hosts announce about their downtime if possible.

What about your hosting, how often does your site go down?

To be upfront about it, 99% uptime is terrible and means the server was down over 7 hours in a given month.

Yes there can be unexpected hardware and network issues with any host. How does your host handle these situations when they happen? Then it just comes down to what is an acceptable downtime to you and your site? Don't like what your currently dealing with then get a new host. Don't like your little free/cheap host uptime, pay a few dollars to protect your investment in your site with a host that can provide what you are wanting.

The only site I have problems with anymore is one of my website maintenance clients sites that they have with Hostgator on a shared account. I'm constantly getting alerts that their site has gone down for, on average, 3 to 7 minutes. The site hasn't changed much in years, but the outages started shortly after Hostgator was bought out.

Tshepo said:

I know that some people who using free or cheap web hosting packages they could face with downtime sometimes.

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You definitely get what you pay for most of the time when it comes to web hosting. Going on personal experience over many years, the couple dollar savings by going with the low quality hosting providers isn't worth it.

Tshepo said:

I think that it's important to improve this by paying a little more for your web hosting to guarantee up time better, even 99%.

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Based on personal experience, just having that guarantee doesn't mean it's going to be that way. Most will offer some kind of credit to your account, but any time it happens most hosting providers have some kind of excuse or loophole to get out of that.

Tshepo said:

What about your hosting, how often does your site go down?

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I have hosting at a couple of different places. One basically never goes down hardly at all, one of the others goes down frequently but that's a cheap provider that I just use for projects that I am working on or testing other things so a little downtime doesn't matter for me. As for my good sites, I have them on the reliable hosting service since those sites are the ones that make me money.

You can never get over 99% is technically impossible but this year most down i've seen on a major company was 3 hours, and they refunded a lot of people, what i always tell everybody is if you are gonna make money then go for enterprises services, this i learned the hard way .

Now a days is easy to have backup servers, you just need a fast dns and a fail over, you can reduce downtime to under 10 mins if anything happens.

clickcloudit said:

You can never get over 99% is technically impossible

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It is easy to have over 99% uptime, and all hosting SHOULD provide greater then 99% uptime.

99% equates to 14 minutes and 24 seconds of downtime every day or 7 hours 18 minutes and 17.5 seconds of downtime every month! That is terrible!!!

99.99% equates to 8 seconds a day, or 4 minutes 23 seconds per month. This accounts for the need to occasionally restart a server or replace hardware.

I will argue that guaranteeing 100% is not possible, as servers do occasionally need to be restarted and hardware does occasionally fail. However quality providers should be able to provide 100% network uptime.

clickcloudit said:

Now a days is easy to have backup servers, you just need a fast dns and a fail over, you can reduce downtime to under 10 mins if anything happens.

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Keep in mind, not all DNS servers honor the TTL that you set. Therefore you have have a TTL of 10 minutes, but some ISP may still send users to the old IP for hours after.

If you need high availability and failover, your better off with your own load balanced cluster with heartbeat monitoring. This configuration, on a collapsible core network will give you as close to 100% uptime as possible.

I have about 99.1% Availability on my site currently, but it might go down a bit. Due to me restarting the node for updates

It is not possible to do 100% uptime, if someone use it as a marketing trick - they lie. Network hardware still can't work to keep 100% uptime. If you need good uptime, I recommend do not use shared hosting at all. It is better to go with a managed server with monitoring. Also with a reputable company...

All hosts face down times either it is cheap or expensive. If a host is cheap it doesn't mean it is bad, there are plenty of hosts that work on very competitive prices. But it is a fact that every host faces some technical issues, it depends on their service & experience that how they maintain and monitor their servers and how fast they recognize the issue and solve it to make you site up again.

I am not sure about free hosts because free is free and it can be taken away any time.

Pingdom has shut up since I moved over to THC Servers. I honestly really recommend them!

I have been using ResellerZom (now owned by JaguarPC) quite cheap shared Web hosting for years. They are well above 99.9% uptime (planned maintenance not counted towards downtime).

Sites hosted at AWS (purely static, at CloudFront, and VPS-based, at EC2) do exhibit even higher uptime (although they are not cheap any more).