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2. "Our Web Hosting
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So what should you expect in terms of availability? 100 percent? Forget about it. No one, especially a cheap web host, can offer 100% availability without a fully monitored infrastructure and a mirror site that can be flipped on instantly in the event of an outage. You’re not going to get that kind of availability without a huge investment…nor do you need to.
It costs them nothing
All you need is 99.9 percent uptime! Most hosting companies are all too happy to offer that guarantee. Why?
Because the fine print in their terms of service contain so many exclusions that they’ll never have to actually provide 99.9 percent availability.
To begin with, the 99.9 percent uptime guarantee means your web site can be down for approximately nine full hours over the course of the year. That may not sound so bad but how would you like your web site to be offline for an hour and a half every other month? And that’s the best case.
The uptime guarantee only covers the availability of the server where your website resides. It doesn’t cover the network which can be down or slow for a variety of reasons, none of which your web host can control. These situations will all be listed in the TOS of your hosting company as exclusions.
A fistful of dollars?
The real surprise, however, comes when you discover what the guarantee actually provides: refund of your monthly hosting fee prorated for the hour and a half hours your site was down. In other words, a couple of dollars.
Is that adequate compensation for your business being shut down? Undoubtedly not, but that’s what you’ll get from a cheap web host or even a full service hosting company. It’s about as valuable that the guarantee you get when the one-hour photo shop loses your film. They replace the film but that hardly compensates you for the value of the memories that were captured on the film.
The solution lies not with the guarantee but with the hosting company itself. All hosting guarantees are pretty much the same, just different by degrees such as 99.7 versus 99.8 versus 99.9.
There's hope
The way to ensure your web site is going to be available 24/7 is to choose a reliable web host whose guarantee you won’t need to call on.
You may wish to re-read our Great Traits section on the best web site hosting companies which covers the factors which separate the best hosts from the wannabes.
In our Web Hosting Review section you'll find a list of companies we can recommend based on their track records. If you're looking for a reliable, cheap web host, you'll find one here.
