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Hosting Tip:
Trust But Verify
by Tom Dahm,
Chief Operations Officer,
NetMechanic, Inc.
Is your hosting company keeping your Web site up and running? For a surprising number of Webmasters, the answer is, "No, not always." And most of these Webmasters don't even know it.
For example, take a Web site run by one of our staffers. This site is hosted at a Top 25 hosting company that promises 99.9% uptime. Yet during a randomly chosen week, our site monitoring showed that the site was offline for a total of 12 hours. That means it was down 7% of the time. So much for our 99.9% guarantee!
Click here to see what our site monitoring showed for a typical day during our test period.
What about your Web site? If it were offline, would you know it?
There Goes the Neighborhood
Most Web site outages are caused by your next-door neighbors. When you host your site with a hosting company, you're sharing a Web server with somewhere between 100-200 other Web sites. If one of those other Web sites is misbehaving, it can drag down the entire server.
This often happens when one of your neighbors installs a badly written CGI script. Their script runs wild and devours the server's CPU. Or maybe you're sharing your server with the Dubya Dance, who's getting 40,000 hits a day, and dragging your site down with him.
These problems can strike at any time. Since hosting companies move sites between servers and add new Web sites all the time, a server that runs fine this month could be in bad shape next month.
No Guarantees, No Matter What They Say
Most Webmasters assume that their Web host monitors their servers and catches these problems before they get out of hand. Unfortunately, while there are many excellent hosting companies that provide good service, some hosting companies cut corners to save money. Server monitoring is where some of them try to economize.
Web site hosting is big business, with major hosting companies typically hosting 50,000 or more Web sites. The three largest hosting companies host over 300,000 sites apiece. That means the typical hosting company is running somewhere between 250 and 500 Web servers. It's no surprise, then, that their support staff may not notice that problems on your server.
Forgive and Remember
Suppose you monitor your site and see that it's down. Should you immediately start looking for a new hosting company?
Probably not. Keep in mind that server outages are a fact of life when you share a Web server with others. There's no guarantee that switching companies will get you better service.
What you should do is complain to your hosting company and get them to correct the problem, either by cracking down on the misbehaving neighbor, or by moving you to another server. Keep in mind that you may have to report two or three site outages before your hosting company manages to track down the culprit.
As much as anything, you should judge your hosting company by the quality of support they give when you experience an outage. Once you report that your server is down, do they correct the problem within the hour? Do they admit the problem, or go into denial? So long as you feel you're being treated well, it's best to stay with your current company and work through the problem.
However, if you experience repeated outages without a solution, then it's time to switch companies.
How Not to Chose a Hosting Company
Many Webmasters use the free version of our Server Check service to evaluate hosting companies. It's a nice idea. After all, if I'm evaluating ABigWebHost.com, why not test their Web site to see how it rates?
Unfortunately, this may give an unrealistically good view of performance. Most hosting companies run their own site on a dedicated server. So while your site might share a server with 200 other Web sites, any one of which could drag you down, the hosting company's site won't have that problem.
The only true way to preview a hosting company's performance is to find the name of a Web site that's hosted there, and then monitor that site for a week.
If you don't know of a site hosted at that company, then you'll have to take your chances. In this case, be sure you monitor your site as often as possible to make sure you're getting the service you expect. The free sample of Server Check will monitor your site for 8 hours. The subscription version of Server Check will check your site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for only $19.99 a month. When you consider that you may be paying $25-50 a month for poor service from your hosting company, that's a good price.
As a rule, NetMechanic doesn't give hosting company recommendations to our users. If you're looking for a new hosting company, you can try a site like TopHosts.com, which publishes a monthly Top 25 list of web hosts.
Remember: there's no reason to settle for bad service from your hosting company. If you're experiencing an unreasonable amount of down time, you can always move your site to another hosting company. Moving a Web site is a surprisingly easy process that doesn't involve taking your site offline.
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