So your website has been down for three days. You have called your registrar and everything is okay with the domain name. You have not made any changes to your website that would cause it to go AWOL. So you contact your cheap web site hosting reseller company and they tell you they are working on it. Another day goes by and they give you the same answer. You ask when they expect it will be completed and they reply “in a few hours.” Another day goes by. You get the same response from the them.
Believe it or not, this is a fairly common scenario. Many budget web hosting companies will skimp on the uptime guarantee as they bedazzle you with fantastic prices and great metrics. However, do not underestimate the importance of an uptime guarantee in your sales agreement! A good uptime guarantee will promise 97% or higher uptime. Currently, it is common to see 99.9% uptime guarantees.
This clause in your sales agreements means that if they are down for more than .1% or the remainder of whatever percent they promise, the cheap web site hosting reseller will refund you on a prorated basis. So, there is a strong financial interest that they keep their websites up and functioning as much as possible. Should they go down, there is an even larger financial interest that they get the server operational again as soon as possible.
Some larger cheap web site hosting companies will even compensate you for lost sales if they are down longer than the promised percentage rate. Though this is rare, it is usually in place for larger corporations and businesses who rent or lease several servers from certain cheap web site hosting reseller companies.
Even though it may be boring and long, be sure to read all of the details of your chosen discount web hosting firm’s uptime guarantee. Better yet, ensure that they currently have one in place! Barring natural disasters and coordinate attacks on your server, there is no reason for an elaborate amount of downtime. The reason some cheap web site hosting reseller companies do not offer a 100% uptime guarantee is because of these unforeseen events as well as server restarts and server maintenance.
Your server must be restarted from time to time in order to keep it running at peak performance. This is inevitable and if you do not currently pay for secondary and tertiary servers, there will be a slight bit of downtime (usually, a server restart takes less than 3 minutes).
Good cheap web site hosting reseller companies will be on the lookout for coordinated attacks on your servers, such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks where thousands of computers access your website simultaneously. This severely slows down your website response time and can even bring it to a halt. Through IP changes and quick server moves, these attacks can be avoided or stopped, provided your web hosting reseller has the resources to do so. Again, their efforts to stop this attack may be motivated by the presence and strength of an uptime guarantee.
Many cheap reseller companies do not offer an uptime guarantee because they are new to the business or have not really established their working order yet. This does not mean you should avoid this company all together. Buying into new hosting companies has its own advantaged! However, I would not put your main website or a site that generates your main source of income onto their servers until they can offer an uptime guarantee in writing for you.
When seeking out an affordable web hosting company, do not be afraid to ask them questions. They might have an uptime guarantee that is not posted in a very noticeable way on their website. Ask them if they can offer any sort of uptime guarantee before you commit to a contract. Most cheap web site hosting reseller companies will try to meet your needs in any way possible.
Once you have your uptime guarantee, make sure it is in writing. Even outside the hosting world, everyone has had some sort of experience with being told something by a salesman and then having a more authoritative person deny the existence of whatever the salesman told you. If you have something in writing, you can present it to someone in authority or the Better Business Bureau, if things should escalate that far. Print out the uptime guarantee from your cheap web site hosting reseller company’s web page and date stamp it so that you have a written record of the agreement before you ever hand your money over.
