Showing server uptime to the public

H

HostingTool

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I think it is a great idea to show your server uptime reports to your visitors. But I see so little hosts, especially the big companies like hostgator and the like do not show uptime reports for their servers.
What do you think?
 
Uptime on a per-server basis may bit a bit overkill. But uptime in general of your network might be something clients may appreciate as it shows transparency.

A publicly viewable page from Pingdom is what we use for this, and since it's a 3rd party controlling it, it also adds some credibility. Any self-hosted solution may not be taken seriously by prospective viewers in my opinion.
 
I have started using Pingdom myself, but am planning on showing uptime and statistics for all servers, once more are on line. I think the client deserves to know the uptime of the server they are hosted on.
 
Well Mate its a good option to show uptime of servers but its little risky also bcoz hackers use to think to harm those servers.
 
Are we talking about uptime for VPS hypervisors or leased dedicated server uptime? If dedicated servers there are a few big issues. First off, hosts have thousands, if not tens of thousands of servers...just displaying that list would be daunting. Secondly, a lot of these servers are self-managed so a server might show 50% uptime at no fault of the host...maybe the owner shut it down for some reason. Lastly, displaying customer's uptime stats is not something some customers might appreciate. Even if you displayed just the IP a whois shows you who the IP belongs to.
 
The problem with displaying uptime is that it can be taken the wrong way.

For example, if we take a server down for regularly short planned periods to perform security & maintenance, it will show a short periods which some user think shows instability.
Yet, if I display the long uptime of some of my KSpliced servers, some people think it shows that we don't patch our servers, so your damned if you do and your damned if you don't.

Obviously we have a 3rd party monitoring solution in place, and we can demonstrate uptime if we are asked, but I'm not sure I want to put it live for the reason's above.

Although I have to say that since we switched to cloudlinux our uptime is something I wouldn't have a problem with displaying if we so wished.
 
Depends, i have StatusCake for showing uptime, like network. But for hardware uptime and loads i just use the default WHMCS Server status.
 
When I was a web host I had a few servers. I always gave the uptime to my clients and future clients by displaying it proudly on my site. If I am going to advertise 99.9% uptime, I was going to prove it. I used whmcs and a third-party site to advertise my uptime on my site. The reason I did both was a way to show people I was telling the truth. WHMCS gives the user up-to-date info that is updated frequently, and the third-party gives credibility to me as a host, and credibility to my whmcs stats.

Now, if you sell a dedi or vps to someone, I wouldn't recommend adding that to your uptime as things can happen. If you offer fully managed services for those servers then I would (until the list gets to big), but if you sell unmanaged, then I wouldn't add them to your list.
 
We try to be as transparent as possible and that's one of the reasons we list our overall uptime for each of our products and each of our servers.
 
It is good to show uptime for all servers, and we're already doing so. We're not using pingdom, but custom coded script, which updates each 10 mins with new data.
 
Pingdom for one server might be a good plan. It's not really necessary to build up your credibility. None of the big companies (Rackspace, EC2, etc.) have uptime counters, it's just common knowledge that they have good uptime.
 
Its a good Idea BUT If you periodically run mentainance your clients or viewers may think your server is unstable. Every server will need mentainance from time to time but a per server uptime report will not offer these explanation thus mis interpretation.
 
If you have any form of uptime guarantee, your clients will also need to have a monitor report which they can use to refer to for their server uptime statistics.
 
some third party services (pingdom included) can also get it wrong.

I have one server that was 100% UP yer pingdom decided to say it was down for 30 minutes. i disputed this providing various logs to showing during the period pingdom said the server was down it was actually 100% up and they reply was
tough we use various locations and if any of them cant reach the server then the server is down regardless to what any logs from the server says
Click to expand...
.
 
easyhostmedia said:
some third party services (pingdom included) can also get it wrong.

I have one server that was 100% UP yer pingdom decided to say it was down for 30 minutes. i disputed this providing various logs to showing during the period pingdom said the server was down it was actually 100% up and they reply was .
Click to expand...

Their response was reasonable given their definition of "down." You can't expect them to troubleshoot cause of "no response" for every server they monitor before posting status.
 
Collabora said:
Their response was reasonable given their definition of "down." You can't expect them to troubleshoot cause of "no response" for every server they monitor before posting status.
Click to expand...

but when they also say their monitoring stations never give out false positives so are always right regardless, just shows they are in denial that they can be wrong sometimes
 
It is definitely better to show the uptime statistics publicly as this will invoke a sense of confidence amongst both potential and existing clients.

It is always a plus point for prospective clients to see a service which they are interested in, have most of its servers at 100% uptime. Whereas for existing clients, it provides a platform for them to base your uptime policy upon, especially if you have any form of SLA in place.
 
MBotelho said:
Do you normally show the http uptime or for all the services?
Click to expand...

Yes we do. We use WHMC and will show

HTTP
FTP
POP3
PHP info
Server Load
Uptime

All these show any client or prospective client the status of all servers. As each of our servers have different specs it means the PHP info can be checked and a client/prospective client can request their account be placed on a specific server that suits their needs
 
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