How do I see server uptime?

[SilentKiller]

Hello Gator's,

As a potential reseller customer. I feel it is quite important to know uptime numbers. Without knowing, how can I possibly uphold an uptime guarantee to my customers? I cannot seem to find uptime numbers anywhere, not even in the whm or cpanel demos.

Another point.. Since with HostGator's uptime guarantee, you must request an account credit. How would I as a customer be able to know when I am eligible to make that request? I would in fact need to know when the uptime percentage reaches a certain point.

Thanks
Joe

[striddy]

Originally Posted by SilentKiller

As a potential reseller customer. I feel it is quite important to know uptime numbers. Without knowing, how can I possibly uphold an uptime guarantee to my customers? I cannot seem to find uptime numbers anywhere, not even in the whm or cpanel demos.

Uptime isn't shown in WHM or cpanel. Once you get an account here you can see uptime from a SSH connection, or by creating a page on the server and run a script showing the uptime.

Originally Posted by SilentKiller

Since with HostGator's uptime guarantee, you must request an account credit. How would I as a customer be able to know when I am eligible to make that request? I would in fact need to know when the uptime percentage reaches a certain point.

Uptime here is not typically an issue. You can use offsite monitoring like pingdom or others to check your sites although HG doesn't acknowledge their results.

[GatorJLavoy]

Sites like Pingdom and the like I've found to be pretty unreliable. However, if you suspect that you are eligible for a credit due to up-time, or would simply like to check on the amount of downtime, we're more than happy to get a number for you. Our internal monitoring system keeps track of outages and we keep records for some time.

[SilentKiller]

Thank you Striddy and JLavoy. Though I dislike the way HostGator's tos section "9b.) Uptime Guarantee" is worded, I can only hope it means something other than I think.

[EarlyOut]

At least HG actually provides a meaningful remedy if they fail to meet the guarantee. At my last host, if they didn't meet the guarantee, you had the right to close your account and get a prorated refund. Of course, even if they did meet the guarantee, you could close your account and get a prorated refund - that was something you could do at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all. In short, the guarantee was completely meaningless.

[Chimpie]

Originally Posted by striddy

Uptime isn't shown in WHM or cpanel. Once you get an account here you can see uptime from a SSH connection, or by creating a page on the server and run a script showing the uptime.

striddy, can you share the coding and script for everyone to see?

Thanks,

Chimpie

[striddy]

Originally Posted by Chimpie

striddy, can you share the coding and script for everyone to see?

Sure Chimpie

PHP Code:

<?php

system("uptime");

?>

This is the basic command but can be formatted differently.

[Chimpie]

Thanks Striddy. Works like a charm.

[Chimpie]

Now I'm researching what else I can do with that script. Like, what else can I get it to show?

[whatrevolution]

Here is Brent Oxley's statement concerning the uptime guarantee, in 2003. Of important note is that he says, "99.99%", multiple times in that thread, yet the customer, the TOS, and other threads of that era claim, "99.9%. As we discussed in another thread recently, 99.9% uptime is equal to 8.76 hours downtime.

(365 * 24) - (365 * 24 * .999) = 8.76

In the 2003 statement, it is said that in the case of 99.99% uptime, a total of 2 hours downtime within any month guarantees a refund (or as TOS states, a credit) of one month of fees for the account in question. While this should qualify as an official statement, considering its source, it does not effectively correlate with our Terms of Service contract, and it is also outdated.

For the case of 99.99% uptime, we would simply move the decimal of our previous calculation.

(365 * 24) - (365 * 24 * .9999) = 0.876

Then multiply by 60 to find the allowable minutes of downtime in a year, because we have been calculating for hours.

((365 * 24) - (365 * 24 * .9999)) * 60 = 52.56

Which is showing that the earlier claim of 2 hours is invalid to the contracted Terms of Service. By the same formula, for the case of an actual 99.9% uptime guarantee, we again will only be moving the decimal of our previous calculation.

((365 * 24) - (365 * 24 * .999)) * 60 = 525.6

This is the same as my first calculation, 8.76 hours, or 525.6 minutes, or 8 hours 45 minutes and 36 seconds.

Additionally, we must define what uptime actually means; the beginning of which can again be found in the TOS contract, 9b.) Uptime Guarantee, which I will itemize here so we may analyze it properly:

1. If your shared / reseller server has a physical downtime that is not within the 99.9% uptime you may receive one month of credit on your account.
2. Approval of the credit is at the discretion of HostGator dependent upon justification provided.
3. Third party monitoring service reports may not be used for justification
4. The uptime of the server is defined as the reported uptime from the operating system...
5. and the Apache Web Server which may differ from the uptime reported by other individual services.
6. Uptime guarantees only apply to shared / reseller solutions.
7. Dedicated servers are covered by a network guarantee in which the credit is prorated for the amount of time the server is down which is not related to our uptime guarantee.

Items (6) and (7) show we are only discussing shared and reseller accounts, that dedicated servers are covered by an undefined, "network guarantee", and that virtual private servers are excluded by omission from these terms.

Item (1) defines, "downtime", as the opposite of, "uptime", and describes downtime as being, "physical", and the calculable period (by inference from the offered credit in compensation for default of these terms) as one month.

Item (2) clearly states that HostGator determines the validity of such a claim, meaning you will need to properly express and prove the claim (convincingly and perhaps publicly).

Item (3) shows that all recommendations by Peer Support Forum members and HostGator representatives, concerning usage of third party uptime measurement systems, (siteuptime.com, for instance), are erroneous advice at best, and the results of such measurements are invalid for proving a downtime period. Such systems will only alert you to the potential that a downtime has occurred by HostGator's determinations.

Items (4) and (5) describe a physical downtime condition as being that which is indicated by uptime records of an operating system, and Apache Web Server. That is to say, they may be referring to available logs of uptime, system malfunction, web server or machine restart/reboot and related information which may prove a downtime by timestamps in the logs. This claim can not be relevant to the Linux uptime command, as that command does not report sufficient information for such a judgement.

For operating system down/up times, a more relevant command with which to gather data is last. I would hazard a guess that HostGator uses Nagios, or something similar, to monitor such data, which would also include the web server data. Apache Web Server has a module, mod_status, which can report such information about that server to its system admin, though we as customers have no access to that level of information.

Clearly, as customers, we will have to further define what downtime means to us, and within that, provision for ourselves some method(s) of collecting proper data.

For the record:

(((365 * 24) - (365 * 24 * .999)) * 60) / 12 = 43.8

43 minutes and 48 seconds allowable downtime in a month, if yearly allowable downtime is divided by 12 months. My (inadmissible) siteuptime.com statistics are showing over 99.9% uptime for the past year, so I wouldn't bean count like that. However, such are the letters of our TOS.

And please, double check my math ( EarlyOut).

[Alkfhals]

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