uptime guarantee

[hobbes]

A 99.9% uptime guarantee is extremely high. What do you offer if you don't meet it over a certain month?

Also, what do you use to monitor your servers' uptime?

[GatorBrent]

99.99% is very high! Few minutes doesn't leave room any errors. Reaching that def doesn't happen on every server every month. We use both alertra and siteuptime to monitor.

If in any month you see that your site is down for over 2 hours total we will refund you for the entire month. Now we don't go out of our way to guarantee anything. If a server by chance does go down for over 2 hours total we only refund those who email in asking for it.

Now you say I thought it was a 99.99% uptime guarantee. Which it is if your site is down 15 minutes and you’re below the 99.99% mark we'll give you a pro rated refund for the few minutes below our mark. That’s what most hosting companies do if you do some research you'll see that guarantees are worthless, and sadly we have to say 99.99 as most hosts out there do. So basically if your site is down 10 minutes don’t expect a full refund. If your site is down for a few hours or more per month you’ll get a 100% refund. Refunds are done within hours so don't expect to be waiting around for it. 8)

[hobbes]

Actually, you mention a 99.9% guarantee on the front page, which means the service can be down for 45 minutes per month.

I'm sorry, I can't find the Alertra link. Could you provide links to each server please?

A pro-rated refund up to two hours isn't worth anything, because it would be somewhere under ten cents. Also, two hours would still be 99.7% uptime, which really isn't bad.

Is that two-hour guarantee in writing anywhere? Do you have customers who you've actually refunded I can talk to?

Thanks!

[GatorBrent]

I got to stop replying back so late. Here it is in writing for you. 8)
If we have 2 hours or more total in any month you will get a 100% refund for that month no delays no nothing, you will be refunded the same day.


As far as clients getting the refund for excessive downtime I know we did it about 5 months ago on one server that was down for around four hours. As far as who got the refund I can’t remember nor could I just go about giving out their contact details. We have that 30 day money back guarantee and do that almost daily with people who change their mind about wanting a site.

We have multiple servers each with different uptimes. Some servers have never been down before. Others multiple times for a minute. Give us an email, and I will provide you with a link for 1 month of free hosting. You will be more than happy with our services if not just leave never paying us a dime.

[hobbes]

thanks, i'm reassured.

just one thing you didn't reply to, though-- how are you measuring your uptime? i assume it's through alertra, in which case can you please post the link to the statistics for each server? thanks!

[GatorBrent]

Alertra failed to notify us many times, and on top of that it did a few false notifications. We now use siteuptime.com on all of our servers accept one which we still use alertra as backup just in case the network itself goes down.

Siteuptime doesn't have links to our uptime...

Heres one alertra uptime link:
http://www.findmyhosting.com/showuptime.asp?id=155489

Uptime is much higher then listed there as if you're down for a minute and it catches you it states that you are down for a hour.

In march we were down for 20 minutes while the server was upgraded to 2.4ghz alertra chalked it down for a hour. In april there was a 70 minutes downtime. We did a routine server reboot on the server and it never came backup. So we had to get a manual fsck done which took about a hour. Total downtime on that server was 70 minutes although it chalked it up as 2 hours down.

[stp]

Hi,

I see from this thread that some time ago you didn't have links to monitor uptime. Is this still the case?

As a reseller, we would like to offer an uptime guarantee, but a guarantee is worthless without some sort of 'backup' like your 'more than 2 hours and receive 100% refund'.

But I can't see how we can offer the guarantee without having access to monitored stats.

Thanks
Sue

We have a setup for internal use that monitors but nothing public currently.

You can offer an uptime guarantee of course, can you explain what you mean by "worthless without some sort of 'backup' like your 'more than 2 hours and receive 100% refund"

Thanks, Ben

[jlgreer1]

You can set up a siteuptime monitor for your server using your domain name as a link. You can then provide a link to the siteuptime statistics on your homepage, enabling you or your clients to check the stats at any time. Situptime keeps the stats and mails them to you once per month. The "free" service checks/logs your site every few minutes. A premium service account will do it more often.

You can check them out at: http://www.siteuptime.com

The server my account is on has only been down once for planned maintenance since I moved here several months ago.

[stp]

Originally Posted by GatorBen

You can offer an uptime guarantee of course, can you explain what you mean by "worthless without some sort of 'backup' like your 'more than 2 hours and receive 100% refund"

I think now days you would be hard pressed to find a hosting company that doesn't quote '99% uptime guarantee'. We would like to setup a system where we offer a money back guarantee, but without access to server monitoring stats, we would have no definate knowledge of our server uptime.

Thanks
Sue

I would recommend websitepulse.com if you are looking for a good monitor.

[stp]

Thanks Ben, I'll give their free trial a go.