How do you know when Shared Hosting isn’t right for you (in terms of uptime) ? Well, let’s start off with the basics. All hosts like to brag about their uptime, their fancy third party monitoring software, and their “wonderful” Guarantees. 100% guaranteed uptime is what I see on most websites. Unless I’m missing something, this is absolutely not possible!
There comes a time in every hosts life when she needs to update software, hardware, or add a few config. changes to existing services. For some, this may happen monthly, for others annually – however it does happen. How can one make such changes without restarting the server – or the given service. If we need to make a change to apache’s httpd.conf, we’ll restart the service in order to allow them to take effect. This is simply unavoidable!
Of course, there’s always that odd customer that loses money for every little second of downtime! He expects 0% downtime – if there is such a thing. He what!!? Yes, I said it – he expects 0% downtime for roughly 4 dollars a month. With more than a few dozen clients on a given server – things are bound to get mucky. Someone’s script may go haywire, another may screw up apache, mysql may crash due to some load errors – it’s all possible in a shared environment! And yet, that client just complains away…
I have news for that client …
Shared Hosting is not for you!
Of course, the client is always right, so all of us honest hosts try to break the news to them as politely as possible. They usually get peeved, take their verbal diarrhea and spill it all over some poor post on an even less fortunate forum!
From there, some other host sucks up, and agrees that “it’s simply not acceptable”, all in a feeble attempt to lure them to their own services.
