Uptime guarantee for Dathorn?

[lilcam]

99.9%? What is it?

thanks

[Andy]

there is no guarantee

[Frank Hagan]

I don't think uptime guarantees are worth much. There are 720 hours in a month, give or take 24 or so. If your server was down for three days, that's 10%. If Dathorn had a 99% uptime guarantee, they would reimburse you 9% of your monthly rate .... a whopping $1.22 at the basic plan. Would you be happy with $1.22 after having your sites down for three days? I wouldn't.

What's more important is the historical reliability of the company, and its responsiveness to problems when they do come up (not if, but when).

I run a separate monitoring service for my website, and the stats for it are:

Since: 12/7/2003
Outages: 3
Total Uptime: 99.722%


The Alertra uptime monitor that Dathorn runs (and allows me to link to) show the following:

Since: 03/28/2003 (over 1 year! Wow)
Outages: 54
Uptime: 99.831%

Last 3 Month Stats, 2004:
April: 2 outages; total time 0 hrs, 18 mins, 30 secs; Uptime: 99.939%
March: 9 outages; total time 3 hrs, 45 mins, 29 secs; Uptime: 99.495%
Feb: 1 outage; total time 0 hrs, 9 mins, 42 secs; Uptime: 99.977

[lilcam]

True, I was only asking because as a reseller, I wanted to put some sort of percentage on my page for my clients. You know, 99.8% uptime etc ...

[-Oz-]

if you will truely guarentee then make it 99.5 or 99.6 to ply it safe

[Frank Hagan]

Without an honest host, how do you ever know if the site is really down, or just your "path" through the Internet to that particular site is down?

I have monitoring set up from London, Atlanta and New York, and London routinely shows much more "downtime" for my site. Somewhere, there's a weak link between London and Texas. Might be that big pond.

Offering a guarantee seems like opening a can of worms to me. The user could truly believe the site is down, and the server is fine. Do you then have to read the outage reports and try to find where some guy in a backhoe has cut through the fiber between your customer and whatever backbone he connects to?

[sdjl]

Might be that big pond.

Probably the fishermen trawling up the nice pipe to the US
Touch wood, i have no major problems connecting from London to the US

David

[reviewum.com]

Boy David, if I were you I'd go one step further than "touching wood" to "knock on wood".

Anybody know where the heck that saying comes from anyway?

(One of my Romanian programmers says "two rabbits with one bullet" while over here it is "two birds with one stone".

Speaking of guarantees I've seen some hosts that give 5% of your monthly rate for every half hour of downtime (not to exceed the monthly rate). So, after 20 hours of downtime you get a month free. Not a lot, but better than nothing or "direct compensation" of $1.22

[Jonathan]

IMO, Dathorn has such great service, I'd hate
to seem them "promise" this and then have to
reemburst us when something goes wrong.

Why? It'd mean they'd have to cut corners someplace,
and I'd be scared as hell when it comes to Technical Staff
or the Servers themselves.

[Frank Hagan]

Dathorn has done a great job of doing the "under-promise and over-deliver" thing.

Which is much better than the more common "over-promise and under-deliver" treatment I was given most other places!

[reviewum.com]

Totally agree! Andrew doesn't need an uptime guarantee and he's definately giving us a great value.

Keep up the great work Dathorn!

[bd2003]

i *do* a month of free hosting for any month where the servers don't maintain 99% uptime - as shown through alertra... that way, just because a client can't get through to his site on his dial-up account it shows him that doesn't mean the server is down... I mentioned on the old forums about a local competitor that is claiming 99.9% uptime - but they make no mention of compensation, how it's verified, etc,. etc., etc... to the best of my knowledge no one has ever collected on it, and not because they've maintained the uptime.

I like my approach because since alertra is a third party, it provides a "neutral observer" as to whether the server is up or down...

need I mention that I have not EVER had to give away the free month?

[Daniel]

Boy David, if I were you I'd go one step further than "touching wood" to "knock on wood".

Anybody know where the heck that saying comes from anyway?

(One of my Romanian programmers says "two rabbits with one bullet" while over here it is "two birds with one stone".

:lol:

To touch wood is a superstition action to ward off any evil consequences, say of untimely boasting; it can also be a charm to bring good luck. The origin is quite unknown, though some writers have pointed to pre-Christian rituals involving the spirits of sacred trees such as the oak, ash, holly or hawthorn. There is, I’m told, an old Irish belief that you should knock on wood to let the little people know that you are thanking them for a bit of good luck. Others have sought a meaning in which the wood symbolises the timber of the cross, but this may be a Christianisation of an older ritual. The children’s game of tag in which you are only safe so long as you are touching wood is not likely to be connected (an indicator of this may be that at times iron was substituted for wood if there was no wood handy). The phrase itself seems to be modern, as the oldest citation for touch wood in the Oxford English Dictionary dates only from 1908; my searches haven’t turned up anything earlier. (Incidentally, that work doesn’t have a single example of knock on wood, which is the American version of the British touch wood.)

To accomplish two objectives with a single action: “If we can get gas and have lunch at the next rest stop, we will be killing two birds with one stone.”

[reviewum.com]

Daniel... pretty funny!

I remember hearing about "knocking on wood" having to do something with evil / back luck gremlins, or something of the sort that live in wood, so if you "knock on wood" it disrupts them so they can't bring you bad luck.

There should be a book somewhere with all these sayings and how they differ from country to country!

<good thing this forum topic is "off topic" as it certainly is!>

[Jonathan]

since I've been to Dathorn, its never been below %99.7;
if I had to promise anything, I'd say promise %99 uptime