For those of you who have been shopping around, you will probably have noticed a lot of hosts saying they will offer an uptime of N (where N is some randomly picked 99.999% type number, or even 100% in some cases). What all these numbers fail to tell you is what they actually mean. Asking for clarification will usually get you pointed towards an obtuse terms document. They will even try to pull the wool over your eyes regarding what happens when they don’t meet these numbers. In most cases there will be credits available if your site is offline for an amount of time, standard seems to be 1 day for every hour offline outsite of the level above.
The Numbers
Availability
per day
per month
per year
99.999%
00:00:00.4
00:00:26
00:05:15
99.99%
00:00:08
00:04:22
00:52:35
99.9%
00:01:26
00:43:49
08:45:56
99%
00:14:23
07:18:17
87:39:29
So lets stay we were to offer a 99.99% up-time “guarantee” on our Starter Web Hosting Package. Your site could be offline for 1 hour, 52 minutes and 34 seconds before we would have to give a credit of 1 day, a credit that is actually only worth about €0.14. What is more, most of these “guarantees” have big get out of jail sections allowing the host in question to say the outage was not caused by them therefore no credits.
Then comes the question of how the up-time is measured. Is an outage only calculated after there is a defined period where the software can’t contact the server, or is every failed attempt counted as an outage. However you check the server will also have an effect on the number it ends up with as will where the checking happens from. If checking happens in Ireland but then the international connectivity to Ireland is reduced (happened a few months back) or even completely removed, does that count as an outage even though everyone in Ireland can still talk to the servers. It all remains very gray at the best of times.
Recently when we here in Vade’s Web Hosting Team had a meeting about up time, we calculated all the different bits that went into an up-time figure. This covers everything for time between hard disk failures to the time involved in running a new network cable should an existing one fail for some reason. What we came up with was that we could provide 100% up-time, 99.999% of the time, the other 00.001% would create an outage that would destroy the up-time stats for years if they happened. In real terms, one of these major problems for every 10 000 other problems is all that it takes. And who’s to say when this one time will actually happen.
For instance, all our servers have redundant hard drives so we can have a failure of 1 disk and things will still keep going without anyone noticing. (except of course our on call engineer who has just been woken up to go replace it – these things never fail during the daytime) If two hard-disks were to go at once, we would need to install two new hard-disks, rebuild the file system array, and then restore the files from the backup server. (We have a rolling 7 day backup system.) Total downtime could be a few hours or more depending on which two disks failed and how far away the on call engineer was from the server with the problem. (Vade runs a distributed network). The same is true of power supply failures, to cpu failures, to any other random part of the server that may fail. In most cases it is quicker to just completely swap out the machine and move the hard disks across, but again that requires time to physically move things, a lot more than the 5 minutes per year available with 99.999% up-time.
So after considering all the facts, we decided we wouldn’t pick a figure at which to base our up-time requirements on. Any outage is already viewed as a failure on our part and gets a full report done as to why it happened and what can be done to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Our customers are also welcome to request credits for an outage too, and I will say that we don’t use the 1 hour = 1 day rule although it has been a while since we have issued any credits. In fact the last one we issued credits for wasn’t even an outage that stopped anyone accessing the site. All I can say is that we are generous because without you our customers, we wouldn’t be operating.
Edit: We decided to share one of the external monitoring services we use. There are issues with using it but it should give an indication of our uptime from an unbiased party. Just click on the image below. It changes to display the actual uptime too.
In response to a recent request, we will now start detailing the updates to the control panel, both on the blog [http://blog.vade.ie] and via the mailing list.
The first of the new features is the ability to be notified when you are getting close to your limit for either bandwidth usage, or disk space usage. This feature can be found in the Account Utilities section of the control panel. Using this feature will allow you to define at what level you want to receive the alerts, and to what email address you want them sent. A mail will then be sent once a day if you are past this limit.
The second of the new features which we have just released is not entirely finished. What is present in the control panel works, it is just that we have a few more features to come and the functionality has not been added to the mailadmin site you can give to your users. So if you haven’t guessed, we have added some more SPAM filtering features. It is being constantly expanded too but if there is anything in particular that you are after, contact us and let us know.
Right now you will have the ability to add email addresses to the domain white/black list. We are already working on expanding this feature out to include an individual list for every mailbox on your account. This feature can be found inside of the Mail Manager section of the Control Panel.
White/black listing can be done on either a hard basis where you say always accept, or always reject, or via a soft basis where you add a little bit of weighting in either direction. Great for those people who like forwarding on silly mailing list type mails, but still occasionally send on “useful” email.
The old adage that says “you get what you pay for” has never been truer than in the Web Hosting and Web Design world of today. With computers dropping in prices at almost alarming rates over the past few years, computer services tried to keep pace. However, most companies have done this by cutting corners and not true costs.
Here at Vade, we will openly admit that we are not, and will not be the cheapest product on the market. If you are happy with a site that works, mostly, and where support is what the other company have bought, then there are a multitude of companies on the market that offer cheaper products. With Vade, you are buying a product we would hope is equal the quality of your own brand. We take pride in our work and the level of service we provide, and we want this pride to felt upon every dealing with Vade. Our support team is always available to assist in every aspect of your design and hosting needs. And unlike with other companies, if you are ever unhappy with an aspect of our business, our procedures, or how you have been dealt with, I welcome you to contact me directly at stephen@vade.ie and voice your concerns directly.
So how do you know if the company you are thinking of choosing is good or bad? Well in my opinion this is actually an easy one to spot. The first thing we usually look at is how much of an investment has a company made to get where they are today. And by this we don’t mean how much money they have spent. These days, a hosting company can be born in half an hour by someone signing up to a reseller package, choosing a company name, and submitting themselves into Google. And for someone who only wants a simple website these “companies” are perfect as they are nearly always cheaper than the competition. If you are looking for something that will live up to the standards you have set for your own establishment, then you want a company that has invested more time and more of themselves into getting their own business to a level they themselves are proud of.
We here in Vade have spent considerable time developing our own custom hosting platform and control panel software. Everything has been designed from the ground up with our customer needs in mind. And as with all areas of our operation, we always welcome suggestions to improve to make your life easier. This gives us enormous flexibility such that if there is a feature a customer wants and we don’t have it, we can develop it, test it, and then provide it. With other companies, they usually have to request the feature from the software vendor they bought their platform from, hope it gets added, and then wait for it to be released. For more information, do check out our website. http://www.vade.ie/
Thank you for your time and I hope that this information is of some use to you and helps you make the right choice for your business.
Stephen Ryan
Director and Owner
Vade Internet Solutions Ltd
So, like everyone else, we here at Vade are starting a company blog. Way to follow the crowd but there is some value to having one. We hope to post some different articles written by members of the team on a semi-regular basis. Any upgrades, news, changes, or outages will also be posted up here. Unlike some other companies, we will leave all of it present after the fact. We don’t believe in hiding what you already know. Every outage we have gets a full RFO (Reason For Outage) and full CAR (Corrective Actions Report), some thing we will also post up here.
To give you an incentive to subscribe, we will post up some different coupons from time to time. We will start by giving you one now, blogspecial, which will give you 10% off on every order, domains included! To use this coupon, use the online order system, and enter “blogspecial” (without the quotes) into the coupon field. It will apply the discount at the summary page. Any trouble, please contact us.
Over the past few months we have worked hard to further improve our infrastructure, and now we are happy to say that another step has been almost completed. We now have four nameservers live and running. Over the next few weeks we will begin updating all our customer domains to take advantage of these changes. New orders will get the benefit straight away.
As with our entire core infrastructure, each nameserver is physically distributed in different locations.
What this means for you is an even lower chance that a failure could bring you website down. A failure of one of these machines should go unnoticed. Better yet, it means faster response times for your websites.
As always, please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
