The meaning of 99.9% uptime guarantee

[karesch]

What happens if Bluehost does not comply with its SLA?

Bluhost is commited to 99.9% uptime (http://helpdesk.bluehost.com/kb/index.php?x=&mod_id=2&root=15&id=234), which means slightly less than 9 hours outage per year. Our server (box126) is down now for 36+ hours, which means that Bluhost could achive maximum 99.59% uptime, if Bluehost could manage not to have any more service interruption till May 2007.

Do we get any refund? What does the guarantee mean?

[areidmtm]

If you would like a refund, you are entitled to a prorated refund after the 30 day trial period.

Even outages, they are protected by the TOS agreement that well agreed to upon signup

http://helpdesk.bluehost.com/kb/index.php?x=&mod_id=2&id=111

[dvessel]

I find that humorous. Your saying the uptime guarantee is nullified by the TOS?

[areidmtm]

Absolutely not! Bluehost DOES have 99% uptime. It just may not seem that why when it’s your box that is down. The TOS only covers them when acts of God and other things that are out of their control happen. This will happen to anyone at any host

[karesch]

I did read through the the TOS, but have not found references to service outages.

So, if I understood you correctly, the 99.9% uptime guarantee means that the customer can walk away any time, if he wishes to do so, but the uptime guarantee implies no obligations on Bluehost.

Anyway, a 99.9% uptime has a meaning only, if you define what you measure (what services are included, you measure it for each box or the average of all boxes, is it measured on monthly/annual intervals) and provide some statistics.

Your final comment sounds a bit horroristic: 99% uptime means 3,5 days of service outage per year, so we can expect two more marathon outages this year. When I signed on I expected 9 hours outage per year (99,9%).

[Mazzic]

I guess I'm not sure of the purpose of the 99.9 uptime guarantee is either.

I suspect it is only there for the warm fuzzy feeling, since all the other host have an uptime guarantee.

Usually when you have something such as a guarantee it provides a remedy to a problem. My mp3 player is guaranteed free from defects for a year. IF it develops a defect then I get to return it for another.

On web hosting such as this..what do you get? It doesn't give me the right to cancel, as I already have the right to cancel at anytime without a penalty fee and if prepaid, the prorated unused amount will be refunded.

My thinking would be that to hit 99.9% you couldn't be down for more than 8.76 hours (365 days X 24 hours in a day = 8760 X .999 = 8751.24 8760 - 8751.24 = 8.76)

Of course, the weatherman tells me frequently that I have a 80% chance of rain and I think I see rain maybe 40% of the time that he says that.

[Basil]

Actually what that means is that there is a 100% chance of rain in 80% of the area they're talking about.

[Tom_S]

Bottom line is you can expect 100% outages (time frame may vary) and slowdowns on a daily basis now with BH. 500 plus new accounts a day! I didn't hear anything about 20 plus new boxes a day to add them to. ACK!

[Early Out]

Since BH usually puts somewhere around 900 domains on a box, 500 new accounts wouldn't require 20 new boxes. I seem to recall Matt saying they're adding a new server every 18 hours, which sounds more like it.

But yes, they are now clearly growing faster than they can handle, and that's a pity.

[Tom_S]

900 domains per box. Now lets figure into that the CPU usage if each account were a company since bluehost caters professional hosting. That is FAR too many accounts for a box. A box is nothing more than a computer. I used to run a Internet service years ago. The box can only handle so much and that is way too much for shared accounts.

[Early Out]

I suspect that a fair percentage of the domains are inactive (people who register several domains, but aren't actually using them), and that, given how cheap BH is, a lot of the domains are held by people like me, with some static HTML pages that don't generate much traffic.

I guess that if I were trying to run a business, I'd figure that $7 a month was not enough to pay for my company's website. If the website is critical to a business, it should look for a more robust hosting service, and be willing to pay for it.

[Tom_S]

Terminology is a huge selling point in this day and age. When you use a promotional tool such as words and in this case the word "Professional" then it should be exactly that. Should I take that word out of context to appease the folks who were stroking my ego to sell me a product? No. I expect to get what I pay for and if you advertise it as such in todays litigious world it best be what it says it is.

[Early Out]

We don't really disagree. I think that BH has oversold its service, and the chickens are now coming home to roost. For $7 a month, they can't really provide robust business web hosting, and they shouldn't have advertised that ability in the first place, at least not at that price. They've now attracted more customers than they can handle, and things seem to be heading downhill.

I certainly hope they can rescue the situation, but mostly what I see are increased marketing efforts. It's almost like a Ponzi scheme!

[Tom_S]

Oh Brother...We sure do see eye to eye now. That sums it up nicely. Well put.

[aceofspades]

what they mean by the TOS is that if they get hacked, there is a malfunction, or if there is a "general bad-luck" event than that doesn't count. If they were upgrading the server that also doesn't could. So the latest DDOS attack wouldn;t count either.

I have to say though my plans specs have risen 100 fold. I used to have 5 GB space and 100 GB bandwidth. Now I have 2 terabytes bandwidth and 500 GB space. That is more space than all the hds in my house combined (and I have 3 laptops, 2 desktops, and one portable hd).

So i don't know maybe a little bit of extra time out isn't such a big deal if you get ur plan upgraded to WAY above that of a normal VPS. The CPU does become a hassle but with 500 GB you could run a filesharing site without a problem (very little CPU as long as you don't start archiving and dearchiving things constantly).

[Tom_S]

Well I agree if you want to compare space and bandwidth with my personal and office PC's but they do you absolutely no good and especially trying to run a file sharing site if the page to serve the file information is going to take longer than three minutes to load. In a nutshell my friend. All the advertising dollars you want to spend on even the smallest of online businesses for just a few bucks of extra income is going to disappear if consumers are waiting for a page to load. People don't wait. This is the age of high tech as you pointed out and everyone is all about the need for speed hence the cable modems up to the T-1's in homes. No one is going to wait.

How many dollars have we lost for this luxury of extra HD space you talk of? Who knows. I am sure they will dig into all this at some point and give it a good go or let it fizzle out after they have made their goal money and drop the whole project. It happens all the time. Sell...sell..sell...never mind the quality just sell it while it is hot and stash the profits until you see the down slide then dump it and bail.

I used to talk to Matt on the phone back when bluehost was being built. Not anymore. He don't answer his phone and don't return calls. We shall see what direction this is all going. I got my fingers crossed but won't keep em that way for a whole lot longer.