Everyone who has ever had a bad hosting account knows that it is a rough ride. No one likes being uncertain whether their site is up or down or wondering how long it will take to load. However, many wonder what the big deal is, especially for sites that aren’t particularly well-trafficked. A few hours [...]
Most bloggers and other hosting customers seem to be pretty happy with their host. However, if you’re among the minority who are not, you need to ask yourself the question: Why am I staying here? Whether you’re fed up with slow servers, too much downtime, bad support, high prices or just not happy with what [...]
Back in June, I penned an article about five lies your host may be telling you, aimed at debunking, or at least questioning, some of the more common marketing claims that hosts use. However, the misinformation doesn’t necessarily end when you’ve become a customer. In many cases, the fibs have only begun. To be clear [...]
If there is one thing that every hosting customer fears more than unplanned downtime, it’s account termination. Most downtime is a temporary thing; barring some kind of tragic hardware failure, your host will likely be back online eventually, the only question is how long it will take. Account termination, however, is a permanent outage and, [...]
If you were once a customer or user of the blog host Blogetery, you aren’t now. On July 9th the site, along with the 73,000 blogs it hosted, disappeared, never to return. It was something of a murder mystery for the Internet. Initially, the site’s host, BurstNet wasn’t making matters any easier and was effectively [...]
It has long been established that downtime is a fact of life for pretty much any Web host. Even Wikipedia, which operates two datacenters, suffered an extended period of downtime earlier this month. Though a good host will certainly keep downtime to a minimum, you can tell even more about the quality of a host [...]
Unless you are a customer on No Support Linux Hosting or use a similarly unmanaged solution, you probably sleep better at night knowing that you are backed up by a full support team, 24/7 and that you can ask questions whenever something goes wrong. However, even the fastest, most responsive support team can not fix [...]
At 7:30 CST one morning earlier this month, I was awoken by my phone ringing. It was Techout, my site monitoring service, informing me of an outage at my main URL. Thinking it was just a false alarm or a simple need to reboot Apache, I leapt out of bed and headed to my computer. [...]
Quickly, what is the uptime guarantee that your host provides? Is it 99%? 99.9%? Or 99.99%? The correct answer is: It doesn’t matter. Though uptime guarantees feature prominently in hosting advertising, including being splashed in big letters on home pages, they rarely, if ever, pay out. Though I’ve already talked about uptime guarantees, it is [...]
Downtime is bad, right? It’s one of the key reasons for switching hosts. The lack of downtime, perceived or actual, can be a key selling point for new customers. For quite some time Web hosts have been active in promoting their uptime, often offering prominent guarantees of 99.x% uptime along with their services. Some hosting [...]