| RavenBlog |
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| Comments on Thursday 24 October 2002: |
| Many web-hosting companies offer a 99% uptime guarantee. I just realised what this means - it means your server can be down for an average of nearly 15 minutes every day. Even ravenblack.net, with no redundancy, with shoddy power supply, with regular exploding into white-hot fragments of doom, achieves nearly this level of 'reliability'. And what do they offer if they fail to meet their guarantee? Taking the first hit on a Google search for "99% uptime" to be representative, they offer "a pro-rated refund of your hosting fees for the month affected." Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that just mean "you don't pay for what you don't get"? Not much of a guarantee - I should damn well hope I don't pay for service I'm not provided with. For fuck's sake. In fact, it sounds like if their servers are down for the entire month, so you get no service at all, you still have to pay 1% of your hosting fee. With a "pro-rated" guarantee like that, they should bloody well be offering a 100% uptime guarantee.
[16:12] |
| Digi |
| Does this mean that you pay for 100%, but can expect no more than 99%, and if you get less than 99% you'll be refunded, or if it does drop to 99%, you'll have your 1% refunded? |
| RavenBlack |
| No, worse than any of that. If it drops to 98%, you'll be refunded 1% of your cost. If it drops to 90%, you'll be refunded 9%. Putting it another way, if your web hosting costs $50 a month, and it's down for an hour every day, you'll be refunded $2.08. WOW! |
| Digi |
| Bah! Silver tongued fiends. You can get always on ADSL at 128/k upload for £30 pounds here in the U.K. It'll soon drop to £20. When people ring us up complaining of loss of service we tend to give them the month free. With the added bonus of having the server machine at the admins house, what's the point of paying for someone else to give you badly maintainted, outdated, RaQ2 servers, which have sparce control over. Broadband must be really expensive in the U.S, or web hosting consumers could be ignorant fools. I'm passing no judgements. |
| Digi |
| I take it all back. They offer "99% or better". I advise all AssortedInternet.com customers to choose the "or better" option. |
| RavenBlack |
| 128 kilobits per second is hardly server-level broadband. My site is currently approaching a gigabyte a day, which suggests it needs an average of about 100 kilobits per second. If it needs that as an average, it probably uses a peak of at least a megabit per second; that sort of broadband is around $500 a month. |
| Digi |
| People who's .com ideas only make enough to budget for $50 a month, are hardly going to need as much bandwidth as you. Plus as I said, there's alot of value in having a server at your house, or place of work. Also most of the web-hosty type services have a restriction data transfer per time period. I'd rather be DoS'd by excess traffic than start paying $1 million a byte. Bet uptime would improve if you'd exceeded your monthly transfer allowance. |
| Brian Teeter |
| Greetings RavenBlack, My name is Brian Teeter, CEO and founder of Assorted Internet Ventures LLC - the company that runs and manages AssortedInternet.com. I want to thank you for taking the time to write about us. We've recieved several hits based on your article. You must have a very successful and popular blog. Now to address your point about our uptime policy. First, we've never had to issue a refund for our uptime guarantee. Ever, in more than 2 years of service. That in itself says something about our reliability. We could certainly offer a 99.5% or better uptime guarantee, as that is what we actually hit. (99.7% on average). But, we are realistic and know that on occasion, for reasons outside of our control, we may have periods of downtime. Rather than promise our customers 99.9% uptime and never deliver - we put forward a guarantee that we _can_ meet each and every month. Regarding hosting on a DSL line - go for it. If your site isn't important to your financial well being, you don't want speed or reliability feel free. When your ready for something better we'll be there. Take care, Brian |
| RavenBlack |
| The guarantee is still of no value to the purchaser, though, is it? I mean, it still doesn't cost you anything at all if you fail to provide - you don't cover any part of what the customer will lose due to your downtime, you just cover the raw cost of what they would be paying for that small piece of time. No matter that your uptime is historically good, such an offer wouldn't make me feel secure. I never had any intent of hosting on a DSL line. That was someone else's suggestion. I also never had any intent of hosting with AssortedInternet.com. I'm sure your uptime is very good, and I wasn't commenting on your service in any way - just on the fact that the guarantee itself is pathetic. |
| Tom |
| I'm rather impressed. I dare you to post a derogatory blog entry about GNU. Maybe you could get RMS to make an appearance. Then you could make up a banner 'RMS appeared in my blog, and all I got was this lousy banner'. You've got fame just sitting in your hand and drinking Earl Gray. |
| Digi |
| Good grief, people monitoring RavenBlack's communications. The dark monks of bussiness are watching. To Mr. Teeter, the comments made under the name 'Digi' are from me. I am not RavenBlack. There are worse people you could have confused me with, but never the less me and Raven are not associated. I dare say RavenBlack doesn't appreciate being confused with me. |
| Nik |
| Is there also a Mr/Mrs/Ms Totter at AIV? Always best to balance your pairs properly, especially such precarious ones. (Note: joke. Please don't be offended or sue me. Teeter is a great name. Really. Much better than mine) |
| Brian Teeter |
| No, not offended, and yes there is a Mrs. Teeter. :-) Ravenblack - I understand where your coming from. We're reasonable people, and I would welcome your suggestions for a fix. Are you saying we should do a full month's refund if we miss 99%? Take care, Brian |
| RavenBlack |
| Something like that, yes. At least something more in proportion to the likely damage caused by downtime. Perhaps a tiered thing; a full month if you drop below 90%, a half month for below 95%, and a quarter of a month below 99%. |
| Linas K. Muliolis |
| My email has been not working for three days straight with assorted internet. They have had to move us from four servers already to fix issues, and new ones keep turning up. I am moving from assorted. This is sooo frustrating, they are not returning emails and have no phone support. |