Uptime, and Microsoft's updates....

M

m3jimmy

New member
I've got a question for you experts. I'm with a Microsoft hosting company (I love .NET....) anyway, this past weekend I went to one of my sites, and it was down. I contacted technical support, and they said that they were installing the latest Microsoft patches. (Ok, it would have been nice if you told me first, but that's besides the point).

I see that some hosting providers are claiming 100% uptime, (or 99.9999%). How can they claim that kind of uptime, when they have to install the latest Microsoft updates each month, and that takes 10 to 15 minutes?

Do high end hosting companies have a trick to get around this problem?

Thanks,
Jim
 
I haven't seen any providers claiming 100% or 99.9999% uptime .. that's basically unrealistic. However, offering 100% uptime guarantees are very different. In that case, their TOS normally spells out credits available for any downtime.
 
Many hosting companies that offer the high levels have a clause in their TOS that states things like scheduled downtime or updates are not considered part of their guarantee.

Notification before something happens is usually done by hosting companies - most provide 48 hours, some only 24 hours - but I guess it can depend on the maintenance they're doing too.

Rackspace offers a 100% network uptime guarantee (or your money back). A network uptime is different than a server uptime guarantee.

I've seen some NEW hosting companies that offer a 500% uptime guarantee and then lose their shirt as they figured everyone else did it, so why not them. What they failed to notice was that companies offer NETWORK uptimes, not SERVER uptimes.

It's very rare that you'll have a network outage, but the events do happen. Broken router, tripped over power cord (power outages) and in the unlikely cases as with The Planet and RackSpace where system admins messed up some routing and it killed peoples access to sites. Don't forget you also have DNS to contend with also.

So there's no real TRICK as such, but just different wording being used. I don't know of any host that offers Guaranteed Server Uptime - the main reason is that it's usually the actions of the user on the server that can crash the server.

For those that offer 99.9% uptime guarantees - that's 0.1% outage, or 8 hours per year! About enough time to reboot the server a couple of times with the latest kernel versions installed :)
 
I have noticed that some companies will be crazy enough not to update the servers at all. I just never want to be with a company like that.
 
They probably have a maintance window during which time they can install updates. I would check the terms of service. It's good to know they are updating the server but you as a customer should be made aware of the scheduled downtime or window they run maintanance.
 
Alot of web hosts will offer 99.9% uptime and give credit if down but no credit will be given for planned downtimes
 
Maintenance windows should be announced well beforehand, and scheduled when least likely to disrupt operations. :)
 
for windows servers they should have a pre defined one day of the month to do this.. they can't be going around applying patches..
 
Steve-Hostirian said:
I haven't seen any providers claiming 100% or 99.9999% uptime .. that's basically unrealistic. However, offering 100% uptime guarantees are very different. In that case, their TOS normally spells out credits available for any downtime.
Click to expand...


well summarised.there is always something in the TOS that would make the downtimes acceptable
 
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