Dear Customers,

This article adds to the series of posts focused on the main pillars of a reliable hosting service. So far, we talked about security, loading speeds and scalability. Now the spotlight moves on to service uptime.

Service uptime is one of the key attributes of a reliable hosting platform. This is why, a service uptime guarantee is one of the main features of any hosting plan and one of the most important factors when choosing a hosting provider.

How to interpret service uptime guarantee?

Uptime is a great measure of how good a web hosting provider is at keeping their system up and running. This is why, each company is expected to assess their platform’s potential for keeping the websites hosted on it available online and to publish the exact service uptime that they are able to maintain.

Generally, service uptime is almost always measured as a percentage (%). Most of the quality web hosting solutions offered online include a 99.5%-99.9% uptime guarantee.

Here is how to interpret the ‘service uptime’ offered by any hosting provider:

• 99% uptime = if the service is unavailable 14.4 minutes/day, or 1.7 hours/week, or 7.2 hours/month, or 3.65 days/year
• 99.5% uptime = if the service is unavailable 7.2 minutes/day, or 0.84 hours/week, or 3.6 hours/month, or 1.83 days/year
• 99.9% uptime = if the service is unavailable 1.44 minutes/day, or 0.17 hours/week, or 0.72 hours/month, or 8.8 hours/year

How do we ensure a 99.9% service uptime guarantee?

On our hosting platform, we guarantee a 99.9% uptime for all services.

This means that we are able to ensure that your websites will be up and running with no interruption for a period of 364 days and 15.2 hours.

The remaining 8.8 hours are a buffer time gap left by our administrators for maintenance procedures aimed at eliminating any eventual server issues and at improving the servers’ overall performance.

The measures we have taken to stick to the 99.9% service uptime guarantee:

• We use only top-quality server hardware components, switches and routers that have proven to have very low amortization levels and failure rates;
• On each server we use an internal firewall so as to avoid over-traffic across the server channel caused by badly compiled scripts;
• We deploy redundant power supply units to help the network recover quickly in case of a power supply failure;
• MySQL, NFS (Network File System), and backups are executed over different networks in our racks. This way, we avail of 2-4 Gbits of bandwidth per server, instead of the 1 Gbit network connection quota assigned to a server by default. This helps us avoid any overload of the network channel that could lead to loss of data packets and hence downtime due to traffic overuse;
• To avoid peak memory usage during script execution, we set certain limits. For example, a client cannot execute more than 1000 processes at a time, since this might seriously disturb the server’s performance;
• We de-activate all outgoing connections to shield your sites from eventual hacker attacks. You can control that restriction from the Outgoing Connections section of the Hepsia Control Panel;
• In the Control Panel, we have integrated comprehensive CPU usage and system load stats that will help you track the performance of your sites and applications in real time and take timely measures to avoid any possible service disturbance;

The measures we have taken to stick to the 99.9% network uptime guarantee:

The network uptime depends on the capacity of the very data centre and we have ensured that our partnering data centres offer excellent network conditions, including:

• Top-quality routers/switches and network cables;
• Redundant uplinks;
• Well-proven, high-capacity UPS units;
• Weekly generator tests;
• High levels of data center security, etc.

We take utmost care in monitoring our server network 24/7/365 to make sure that this uptime guarantee is observed and that the services are being delivered as smoothly as possible.

We have chosen to work with data centres, which offer perfect connectivity and which employ top-quality networking hardware devices whose performance has been tested under different workload conditions.

Also, we use Gbit network cards to ensure blazing-fast connectivity and a reliable Linux OS that will guarantee a stable performance for your customers’ resource-hungry projects.

Kind Regards,
Web Hosting team