Outage Complaints

[Hoosierhunter]

How do you go about outage complaints, especially in host services that promise better? How many outages do you typically accept as excusable before leaving a host?

[monaghan]

It depends on the reason given, some are beyond the hoster's control others are due to bad management. The management related issues should be raising alarm bells.

[soul-healer]

If your website is selling products or offering services or your business depends on online sale than for me single outage once in blue moon is acceptable .. If your business is not affected by outages but have repuation issue than outage of 5-10 mins per month is acceptable.

[penguinmama]

Would that be an average, soul-healer? We usually go several months without outages, but when we do go down (usually for maintenance/upgrades, but occasionally because of our ISP), it's often for an hour or so. It would average to 10-15 minutes a month. Would that be acceptable in your host?

[soul-healer]

For me 1 hour of outage is too much it will leave a bad reputation.

Atmost 10 mins outage is acceptable (not every month) as maintaince needed but this is also once in a blue moon. The longest outage my company receive is of few hours as the RACK torn off and we have to move to another rack (unitl the old rack repaired) and that rack dont have the capacity to hold all of our servers and 2 server faces outages of more than 1 hr. Other than that outages wont me more that 5-10 if is some technical problem but wont that rarely happens as we moved all our servers to plesk and there seems to be no problem and all the servers run smooth.

For me outages of 5-10 mins/ month is also too much .. But different clients have different priorities.

[paperclip]

I'd say it would depend on the content of the website. I have seen sites go down for quite a while, but the host put a page stating is their issue so the site owner doesn't suffer

[ale_jrb]

Some websites can be out for a long while without suffering much; others will lose business if they are offline for a few minutes a month. Because of this, it really depends on what you are doing with your website as to how long it should be before you consider moving to another host. In general, I would say, start getting 'annoyed' at your host if they are offline for more than 10 - 20 mins a month.

As for complaining to them, I usually find that a simpe e-mail to their customer support department will help. And of course, if they don't have a customer support department that you can complain to, you shouldn't really be using them.

[monaghan]

If your business is that important to you that 10-20 mins downtime will hurt, then your budget needs to be far bigger than your average shared host.

It really surprises me how much people are prepared to risk to save a few £'s. If you read the T&C's for most DC's, the remote hands will often not guarantee a response within the 10-20 mins, yet hosting companies still offer this as a response, previous response times can't be guaranteed in the future. You may get the hosting company's support guy to log into the remote console on the PDU to pull a power cycle, but root cause analysis is not a 10 min job.

Guaranteed high availability needs redundant equipment rather than just a good host and a bit of luck and doesn't come for £5/month.