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

Dear Customers,

Several days after binary storage was added as an upgrade to the web hosting Control Panel, today we extended the upgrade list with the Installation & Troubleshooting service. As of right now, it’s available as an upgrade to all cloud hosting and semi-dedicated servers customers.

This is not a new service to our platform. Those clients who have signed up for Virtual Private Server and dedicated server accounts already know it as a valuable upgrade that allows them to get one-time expert assistance from our professionals for a period of 1 hour.

After numerous requests from cloud hosting accounts clients for having more in-depth advice on managing their sites, we decided to compile an Installation & Troubleshooting package to the demands of the rest of our clients too.

As of today, clients can “steal” from our busy technicians’ and administrators’ time and get timely help with more cumbersome tasks such as:

• Installation of applications, custom plugins, modules, etc.
• Solving setup/operational problems with 3rd party applications
• Advanced support with scripts and applications.

Customers wishing to take advantage of the Installation & Troubleshooting service can order it from the Upgrade Services section of the Control Panel.

Once ordered, the user will avail from 1 to 5 hours of installation & troubleshooting services executed by either an administrator or a technician, depending on the type of service needed.

The new Installation & Troubleshooting upgrade, along with the extra binary storage option, will further extend our customer support services and will meet your special needs.

Soon, we’ll be adding new valuable upgrades to the Control Panel and will make its interface behave more intuitively to your needs of upgrading your package as your online presence grows. Stay tuned!

Kind Regards,
Web Hosting team

Dear Customers,

In our previous posts on what we do to make your site successful online, we touched upon the topics of enhanced site security and boosted site loading speeds.

Now we’ll focus on another aspect of maintaining a successful website that every hosting provider should be responsible about – service scalability.

As active websites get hungry for more server power and resources every day, it is the flexibility of a service that will allow them to grow online.

In tune with the ever-growing users’ demands, we have centered our web hosting platform around full scalability, i.e. the capability to cope with and perform under an increased or expanding workload.

We have developed a full range of web hosting services covering the whole spectrum of possible online demands and have placed a special emphasis on the quick and easy transition from one service to another.

Our custom-built web hosting Control Panel lies at the heart of this trouble-free transition. It allows for you to quickly move up the staircase of website growth without need to worrying about shortage of resources.

The shared hosting solution is great…till a certain point in time

The cloud hosting packages cover the needs of a regular web presence – from small personal to mid-sized business websites. If you needs more websites to manage or databases to use, you can easily upgrade to a more feature-rich package. However, what if the resources offered even by the most powerful cloud plan become insufficient?

Upgrading to a server solution

In most cases, upgrading from a regular cloud hosting package to an advanced server solution might require considerable time and effort on your end – moving all the content for your site, updating all script configurations, adjusting the DNS settings for your domain name, testing if everything is working as it should be, etc.

With us, the transfer of the web content to the new server solution will be carried out by our technicians, so that you will not need to do anything on your end. It will take only an hour or so, before the site is completely operational on the new server, as compared to hours and even days – if you were to handle the tasks on your own.

Migrating to a semi-dedicated server

If when on a shared hosting server you start managing more CPU-intensive sites, i.e. sites based on more sophisticated scripts that require large amounts of data to be processed in real time, you will have then outgrown the potentials of a regular shared hosting service and will need to move to a server solution. This may sound like a hard task to handle. However, on our platform, you can upgrade from a shared account to a semi-dedicated server setup with a click of the mouse, just like when you upgrade from a Basic to a Medium Business cloud hosting package, for example.

Migrating to a Virtual Private Server

On a semi-dedicated server, you enjoy plenty of database size and CPU usage quotas. However, sites with multimedia-rich content and complex backend architecture will need more RAM resources to process user requests during peak traffic times. This is where the virtual hosting solution can come in real handy.

Through the Hepsia Control Panel, you will be able to move on to a virtual private server setup with a click of the mouse, no matter if you have a shared web hosting or a semi-dedicated server package.

Migrating to a dedicated server

Moving to a dedicated server may still sound complicated and time-consuming. However, thanks to the Hepsia Control Panel, migrating to a dedicated server is just as easy as moving from a shared hosting account to a semi-dedicated solution, for example. It takes just a click for you to request a platform upgrade and leave the rest to our support team. In most cases, the transfer to a dedicated server will require about one hour, depending on the size and complexity of the transferred content.

Kind Regards,
Web Hosting team

Dear Customers,

With respect to the recent security issues with the OpenSSL certificates, we'd like to assure you that all our systems have been patched, as appropriate.

We have also scanned the IP addresses of all the networks under our control to make sure that no vulnerabilities are allowed on our end.

With regard to customers who use our server packages - we have made the necessary updates on behalf of those who take advantage of our managed services and have sent update instructions to the self-managed ones.

Kind Regards,
Web Hosting team