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Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 Time: 12:26 AM
Okay, so you've decided to subscribe to a new web hosting service. However what perplexes you most at this point is the identification of the most important aspect of the web hosting company that should be high on your list of priorities. In other words, you are unable to decide as to which of the most prominent web hosting features advertised by the host is of critical importance to you as far as your site's visibility and reliability is concerned. Is it the disk space that should be high on your list of agenda, the data transfer or bandwidth, the number of MySQL databases, the number of e-mail accounts or the uptime promised by the web host. If you are an online business and are dedicated to make your business a success, your eyes will definitely stare upon the last of the above mentioned features, which is the uptime guarantee. Assuming that the other features satisfy the minimum requirements of your business website, it is the uptime guarantee that can eventually decide the fate of your online business. The intent of this article is therefore to help you understand what uptime means and what implications it can have for your business.
So what exactly does the term "uptime" mean? Uptime is the total amount of time that the servers of a web hosting company are running without any interruption. Theoretically speaking, to achieve an uptime of 100% is next to impossible for any web hosting provider no matter how good their infrastructure is, how high quality and up to date their equipment and servers are, and how good their connection to the Internet backbone is. What is instead practical is an uptime guarantee of 99.5%, 99.9%, or 99.99%. These figures respectively mean that the total amount of time that your website will be down in a month (taking a month equal to 30 days) is 3.6 hours, 43 minutes, and 4.32 minutes respectively. From this, you can easily conclude that the higher the uptime guarantee, the better it will be for your site in terms of the total amount of downtime. However, as you visit different web hosting companies you may notice that almost all of them are promising an uptime guarantee of 99.9% or more. The question is, how can you verify this in the light of the equipment specifications mentioned by the company? Before answering this question, it is important to find out the major factors that may account towards a web host's downtime.
Downtime usually is of two types, planned or unplanned. In case of planned downtime, the company has to restart their hosting servers on some scheduled date and time and this is something that is unavoidable. If the servers are not maintained on a regular basis, it may prove to be a security risk for the hosting company. However, this is also an issue that is debatable to some extent in that the quality and specifications of the servers play a major role in defining how often they will need maintenance. Yet, irrespective of whether the servers are up to date and top-notch, at some point in time they will inevitably need some overhauling so as to ensure their smooth and continuous operation. The planned downtime is not included in the uptime guarantee promised by a company and so the specifications of the servers may give some hints as to how often this may be carried out.
The second type of downtime is the one that can have more serious consequences for the end-user, the unplanned downtime. As the name indicates, the reasons for this type of downtime are unforeseen circumstances which are outside the control of the hosting company mainly because no particular attention has been paid in order to circumvent them. Multiple factors may be responsible for this type of downtime such as the absence of ruggedness of the overall infrastructure, the lack of security and reliability procedures followed by the company both on-site and on their servers, as well as the unavailability of redundancy included in the hardware and the software platforms. It is common for big web hosting companies that emphasize on having as little downtime as possible to deploy clustered servers which can increase the reliability of the hosting platform manifolds. This is because in case a server goes down, there is another server in place to take up its job and the transition is so smooth that it is not even visible to the visitors of your website. The greater this redundancy, the higher the reliability of the hosting platform.
Web hosting servers running on a continual basis are much prone to getting heated up, so proper air conditioning equipment in the data center can ensure that CPU heat up is not the cause for a server to shut down. Make sure that the detailed specifications mentioned by the company include the use of latest air conditioning systems in their data center. The security software installed on the server including antivirus and firewall software also plays a great part in deciding how strong the defenses of the system are against any malicious attacks or hijacking attempts by hackers who are always on the lookout for loopholes to exploit. Again look for what type of antivirus and firewall software is being used by the company on their hosting servers. The best-of-breed equipment, routers, switches and hubs used in the data center also play their part in increasing the uptime. Read the specifications carefully to see what brand of servers is being used by the company. The most popular and stable servers include Dell servers for instance with Xeon processors or better. The amount of random access memory RAM included in their systems is also important and the higher the GBs, the better. As far as switches and hubs are concerned, Cisco switches are normally the number one choice for all the major web hosting companies.
All web hosting companies offer a service-level agreement SLA to their potential customers which may include the uptime promises and may also occasionally include any compensation in case they fail to meet the uptime promised. The web host may display on its website the total amount of downtime that your site has experienced and may credit your account accordingly in order to compensate for the loss. A highly competitive and dynamic web host may also give its clients updates on the total amount of downtime that their servers are experiencing in real time. In the extreme case when there is frequent downtime, there may also be the option for you to get a refund of your money less any hosting charges that you may have incurred up to that point. To conclude with, seeing a 99.9% figure for the uptime guarantee is simply not enough to make your decision to go with a web hosting company in question. Instead, a detailed inspection of the specifications provided by the web host including the stability of their hosting platform along with keeping in mind the other factors mentioned in this article can help you avoid the trap of choosing the wrong web hosting company. A web host with a good uptime will payoff in the end by contributing the most to your online success.
About the Article
This is a genuine article custom written for WHL (WebHostLead.com). WHL is an unbiased hosting reviews directory based on webmaster reviews about the top 10 web hosting providers.
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