Downtime guarantee and service monitoring

Downtime guarantee and service monitoring

Having a personal website go down is a minor inconvenience; having a business website down is serious business. How much profit do you lose if your site has been down for a week? Long downtime can be very harmful for companies today who spend large amounts of money on advertising their websites. Essentially, there are two rules about the reliability that one should look:

1. You should check if there is an uptime guarantee offered. A true service-oriented provider will also give a money back guarantee, offering a discount or free service as compensation for downtime. Any company that avoids taking the responsibility will not put much effort in the service.

2. I certainly would not go with a company claiming 100% uptime, as there is no such thing as a server with 100% uptime. If anyone ever claims their server has a 100% uptime they are either lying or they do not meet the necessary upgrades that prevent a machine from being compromised.

Reputable web hosts will post statistics on their site: What is the frequency of interruption? How about the average percentage of downtime? If these are not posted, ask; if the answer is not forthcoming, that should be a warning sign. If you always go with a host which does not monitor servers, you'll have to do it yourself surveillance. I recommend http://www.siteuptime.com because it is one of the best monitoring services available for free on the market today.

Backups

There is no home is safe against different types of technical and programical failures, so make sure the company runs scheduled backups. The other tip is to always have a backup of your site yourself, you never know what might happen. cPanel, a Web hosting software the most popular of the management at this time, has a very comfortable decision backup tool. It allows you to backup files and databases quickly and easily, so backups are not a problem.