Web Hosting In addition to providing rack space and managing servers and storage, many hosting service providers also look to manage the applications that run on their customers’ Web sites. Reliability is critical in the Web hosting arena, and competitive pressures are even driving a few hosting providers to make unrealistic promises. In February, for example, Electronic Data Systems offered a service level agreement that promised 100 percent availability for Web sites and applications that EDS is hosting. This is raising the bar pretty high.
Other service providers have often promised 99.99 percent (commonly referred to as “four nines”) uptime, which gives them a cushion of about 53 minutes of outage time a year when they can down the servers briefly for regularly scheduled maintenance. A few have even touted “five nines,” or 99.999 percent availability, which narrows the margin for error considerably.
While these claims are suspect in their own right, promising 100 percent uptime seems to be over-reaching a little bit further. Even if you offer “nines to the nth degree” availability, you’re still not going so far as guaranteeing 100 percent availability. One hundred percent availability doesn’t leave much room for mistakes and disasters, especially these days when there’s so much for Webmasters to worry about, from cyberterrorism threats to over-subscribed Webcasts that overload the server.
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