Uptime Guarantee - Good or Bad Idea?

uptime Guarantee is good and bad the down side if the datacenter's network has issues and you have no control over it can cost you. But if you get into a quality datacenter then it can work for you
 
I feel that web hosting resellers can not accurately provide an uptime guarantee since they don't have control of the server. Those who do post a guarantee most often just put it on their site for marketing. I have seen that very few resellers and actually most companies that have their own server do not honor the guarantee.

Like Mark said above it is actually a contract that is legally binging. I do not understand why most companies do not stand behind it. In my experience if you do fall below your guarantee for a month or whatever it is and you do reimburse a customer that notifies you of it, you will find they are pleasantly impressed and will project a very positive image of your company. This will lead to more referrals and so on.

Most companies like to see the money coming in but cannot stand the fact to give back a little money even knowing that taking that small loss will potentially generate alot more gain in the future.

Resellers that post an uptime guarantee need to understand that the server control is out of their hands, and if they choose a bad company with alot of downtime they are really going to suffer from it and will have no control over it. So research for them is a must if they want o post the guarantee.
 
besides marketing tool, uptime guarantee is a certain obligation, when you guarantee smth you should be able to give smth back if your guarantee fails, reassure that your mother-company (or your web hosting provider) will give you credits for the unreasonable downtime
 
Uptime guarantee used to be an issue when the hosting industry started but I guess the technology improved tremendously today and downtime is a minimal issue. In my case, even the cheapest web hosting service can guarantee 99% uptime and so far they stick to their word.

If you can provide a 99% or a 100% uptime guarantee, then backed up your word with a money-back guarantee to build trust and assurance from your clients. Just be sure that you outline your money-back guarantee in a thorough guideline/agreement.
 
Yes We do for most of the times. I have promised my customers to provide 99 percent uptime, till last week it was 99.9 percent and now I have achieved 100 percent. I informed all my clients and they were all really happy about that. Uptime is the most important factor in any hosting business.
Whether you are a customer or a reseller, you have to look for uptime. But promising for uptime and compensating that with discounts wont work with any reselling accounts. So dont promise them if you are in doubt, nothing is 100 percent perfect in this world.
 
We don't offer an uptime guarantee however if anything does happen we do usually give service credit.

Obviously there's many levels to uptime guarantees if we assume most are network uptime guarantees does this just cover the connection to the switch, guaranteeing the switch will always be available, does this cover traffic to their routers and once it's out of their network it's not their problem? If that's the case who do you talk to if their route to you is unusable?

Is the guarantee still good when there is hardware failure, or is this an exception? What about DDoS attacks? are these an exception? I've seen SLAs where there's so many exceptions it was hard to think of a cause of downtime that wasn't excluded

Even when looking at 99.99% uptime guarantee it still allows for a good amount of down time, and if you're down for 10 minutes but still maintain your 99.99% over whatever period you're choosing (let's say a month) you'll still get people moaning that you were down so broke your uptime guarantee.

When talking about hardware, however much you invest in a server you can't guarantee anything, you can obviously guarantee a replacement within X hours but then what if you have a power surge totalling 50 of your servers and you only have enough spares for 10? What happens to the other 80%.

This is why we just publish our reliability figures and compensate for major downtime.
 
We don't have an uptime guarantee but if there is an error that's beyond our control we will give clients who are effected a discount on their next billing cycle. However we will not provide credit for downtime if we have to perform maintenance on a server and it has been planned in advance.

But we do aim to provide at least 99.9% uptime
 
hostlegal said:
Over the past few months, I have had numerous discussions with webhost resellers about the issue of "Uptime Guarantee or Commitment". From an end user perspective e.g. website client, I can definitely understand why you would want some type of uptime guarantee; however, if you are the webhost reseller with just a reseller account and do not your own or control the server, how can you honor the uptime guarantee?

I'm very curious to hear other people thoughts and comments on this simple but very explosive issue.
Check what uptime your server host gives. And then apply the same to your customer. No other go!
 
uptime guarantee is the only way to go. I know of many customers that will not use a company b/c they did not advertise their uptime guarantee. Uptime is the most important thing to every customer. be sure to offer it and make sure the customer knows you offer it.
 
Uptime guarantees are essential.

If you are a reseller, you have to have some kind of guarantee that you are getting what you pay for, right?

Obviously, it can't be down for the entire month.

Even a full day would be too much of a loss for most resellers.

So what kind of guarantee do you need to thrive?

As close to 100 percent as possible, right?

The same goes for your customers who have customers of their own.

If you are reselling and cannot get a guarantee from your provider that you trust will be compensated in time to handle any issues, then you need to look elsewhere or look into purchasing insurance on your uptime.

I don't feel that discounts are worthy of any downtime issues, at the least the customer should have an option of an immediate refund or the discount, and all of that should most definitely be outlined explicitly in your ToS.

If any specific customer needs a more reliable uptime than you can guarantee, I advise to work closely with them to find a resolution, as the most important customer of all is the one you are dealing with at the moment.
 
Reliability is key. You have to not only give your customers that assurance, but you have to back it up. A guarantee means nothing unless you back it up.
 
Its good to have one if you can keep it what you say it is. Otherwise you might aswell be honest and tell your customers the truth.
 
Its better to give a true happening guarantee than having 99% or 99.9%. we can never predict how well the server runs, but we can monitor it continuosly to ensure up-time. No math can be employed here. Just uptime depends on service
 
if you can honor the gaurantee it is a good selling point but ultimitly if you don't own ther server I don't see how you claim any uptime gaurantee.
 
Hello,

I feel uptime guarantees are only good if you can actually keep that guarantee. If you are unable to then saying you can in the long run makes you and your company look like your out to scam people.
 
Since you are reseller for that company, you have to confident with that company for what they are committed with you..

If not, why you keep continueing as a reseller for that company..
 
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