Web Site Hosting Reviews

   You are looking for a home for your web site - be it personal or business. How quickly would you decide to pick a physical building to move your business into? I would guess that you would take some time to consider a variety of options and factors. Why should you do any different in cyberspace - on the Net?

   Check out their uptime guarantees in detail - they vary considerably. The best will offer somewhere around a 99.5% uptime guarantee. They automatically apply any earned credits to your account if the server is not up 99.5% of any given month. A web site host like this, that is, with high standards, then calculates the downtime down to the minute and subsequently reports every minute of downtime publicly - and to all its clients. They even post the results on their own web page for anyone to see and check. But get this, the most important point: you get the credits even if you didn't know the server was down!

   For other web site hosts, to get any credit you must submit a detailed report concerning your web site's downtime in writing; then, this document must be verified by the host. The cost of the host monitoring its servers to ensure your site is up as much as they guaranteed it would be may cost more to them than the refund is worth. Check out the fine print. Talk to them if possible!

   Still other web hosts present you with a clever offer. To receive any credit, their servers must be down five consecutive hours. So, they are down four hours one day, two another, three another, and so on, but hey! - they were never down five hours in a row - on a trot - hence, sorry but no credit, man.

   Another example: you see a certain web site host is offering a 99.999% uptime guarantee. Great! BUT, to qualify for the guarantee, you must first sign a "guarantee contract" with them. OK, so what does this mean? In short, it often means that you must choose - and pay for of course - from among their most expensive packages. On top of this, they advise you, if you buy extra features from them, this will certainly help your site stay up more than if you didn't buy these features - more than their cheaper clients! You get what you pay for, according to these hosts - and they pocket the difference.

   Finally, the ultimate 100% uptime guarantee! This is what everyone wants, after all, isn't it? They tell you that if your site is down for more then ten minutes at any time (standard for necessary system reboots), they will credit you 25% of your bill! Submit the detailed documentation of when your site was down, they'll compare it with their logs, and if they match exactly, they may get back to you and even fulfill their promise. Again, read that small print - make it bigger with your browser's "increase font size" option! You may well find something like the following: "No more than one outage per month can be credited."

   Take care, do your homework - research, research, research - and you may well save yourself major headaches and financial losses down the road. Uptime is good time!