So Much for 99.9% Uptime

Originally, all my sites were hosted with Host A. For a couple of months at the start of this year, my sites suffered so much downtime I moved them all across to Host B.

Host A, for the most part, has been good, and I can forgive them for suspending my account every time I write a script with an accidental infinite loop. Anyway, for complicated reasons, I had to move one of those sites back to Host A, and it looks like things haven’t changed. This was the response I got to a query about today’s downtime:

Please accept our sincere apologies for the problems caused to you in this matter. This issue had been caused by the server’s urgent unscheduled maintenance that has taken place recently. We detected hardware problem on the web server, that serves your sites and replaced all misbehaved parts. We are working on the restoration now and it will take us about 24 hours for this process. We fully understand that such issues caused problem to you and we are more than concerned about this situation. We appreciate your patience and understanding in this situation as we doing our best to provide the highest level of web hosting services.

When you derive your income from the web, 24 hours is a long time, and it’s costly, too. What I find most annoying though is the over-the-top advertising that Host A uses to get you to sign up. Here are some quotes from Host A’s CEO:

“I Will Guarantee You With My Own Money That You Will Not Be Dissatisfied.”

I can proudly say that we successfully provide the service people are looking for 24/7, every day of the year.

I will prove the high quality of our product and service to you.

Host A is so confident you’ll be happy with their services, that they offer an “Uptime or Cash Guarantee”:

Host A guarantees that your website will be up and running at least 99.9% of the time during any 12-month period. This guarantee includes network uptime, server uptime, web server and service uptime.

…and an “Any-Time Money Back Guarantee”:

This “Any-Time Money Back Guarantee” can be requested at anytime that you are not satisfied with IX Web Hosting services.

The problem with these guarantees is that they allow you to claim back the paltry $7.95 that they charge you a month, instead of claiming compensation for earnings lost during the downtime.

And just for the record, 99.9% of 365 days is 364 days and 15 hours, so I want my $7.95 back! 🙄

If you like, you can find me on Twitter at @nick_ramsay. I'd love to hear from you!