99.9% isn't Good Enough
99.9% sounds good for most things, with good exceptions being landing an airplane and web hosting. If an airport had a safe landing record of 99.9%, that would mean that out of every 1000 landings, one plane would crash. That’s not good for travelers.
What about web hosting? The industry standard for hosting is 99.9% uptime, but is that all so great? At about 45 minutes per month, we think that is way too much. That figure is about 44 minutes a month too much. Larger hosting companies often have to reboot servers holding hundreds of websites because a application is stuck. That means if your website is on the same server as someone with ‘issues’ with his website, your website uptime will suffer with everyone else on that server.
Additionally, customer service at the big hosting companies is less than optimal and calling it ‘service’ is a bit of a stretch.
45 Minutes of Outages per Month is Outrageous
If you’re company is only worth $4.99 per month, then go with the big hosting companies and expect 45 minutes or more a month in outages. Ok if you have a crappy website, but if your website is performs, wouldn’t you want closer to 100% uptime?
45 Minutes per Year or Less is More Like It
That’s why I recommend Xponex Hosting Services for your SMB (Small to Medium Business). Xponex has personal service with an account rep assigned to you for future needs. Over the past 365 days as of this posting, Xponex Hosting has been up a staggering 99.99 % of the time*.
How is Xponex able to maintain such a high degree of uptime? Redundancy. Redundant everything from power supplies to actual power to the servers. Xponex maintains additional equipment programmed and ready in a moments notice.
Maximize your SEO Efforts
Having your website down means immediate loss in potential business and may hurt your ability to get indexed in search engines such as Google and Bing. Having your website hosted by a company with the highest uptime possible is your best most reasonable consideration when choosing a website hosting company.
Xponex Hosting Hurricane Ike Horror Story
During Hurricane Ike, the facility where Xponex servers are housed, were without power. Yet the webservers remained ‘live’ to the internet during the entire 10 day ordeal with no power coming from the electric company.
“We thought we were safe from hurricanes, being in the midwest United States, but that was not the case with this hurricane. Ike went right up through the midwest and tore down our power lines. Everyone was without power, except the Xponex Data Center. Xponex hosted websites were on backup generator for 10 days.” Scott Gardner, Server Management.
*Based on the most recent server uptime report dated November 16, 2010.