Hosting Network Status Page and Uptime Logs & Support response times

[robbynz]

Hi

I am looking for an new hosting provider to replace my existing host. My current host is great, but unfortionately their prices no longer allow me to be able to offer competitve hosting to my clients, and I have been providing hosting for over 10 years. As a rule I do tend to change web hosts every 3 years or so because of this web hosts don't often improve their diskspace/bandwidth ratio over time. Do you improve your plan offerings regually?

My current host provides a network status page as part of their forums, which shows all the servers status, and server loads. I know that this information is also available in cPanel or WHM, however when server loads are high, cpanel is often unresponsive or unaccessbile, which makes the cpanel version useless. The also report all issues in their announcements page on their forums, where people can also reply and report issues.
They also have Alertra uptime logs, where we can check the uptime. Do you offer any of this, so I can find out how relibable your servers actaully are, and how you deal with communicating any downtime with your customers. I notice you do offer a %99.9 uptime guarantee, but if a sever doesn't reach this uptime level do disclose this to your customers and automatically credit your customers, or do you require your cusomters to provide their own uptime records, and to contact you to ask for the refund.

Also what is your guranteed email ticket response time? I notice you do advertise 24x7 phone and email support, however I have read a few comment in the forums which concern me. One customer was trying to contact you by phone, and you replied that you were 'rebuilding your phone systems', which sounds suspicious for a professional company. Another point was made that they hadn't received a reply to an email ticket. My current provider replies within 1/2 hour with either the issue fixed, or that the problem is being investigated. Do you guarantee similar replies, or is your 24x7 suppport system mean that we are able to access your knowledge base system 24x7, but contacting a real person is within business hours only.

I hope you can answer all these questions, and i am sure the answers will also help other people.

Thanks

[robbynz]

Also can you please tell me what your advertising means on your homepage, when it says 'We'll buy out your old contract' when it refers to Transferring your webhosting.

[lnxcode]

Robbynz - Welcome to the HostICan Community.

1. Alerting system - you are more then welcome to setup your own custom alerting system, which may help you keep tabs on us I think our uptime speaks for itself.

2. We try to answer all tickets within 15 - 30 mins. However, there isn't a guarantee time frame that you will be answered in. I would say the longest I've ever seen a ticket go unanswered is 1 hour. Which isn't exactly long, if you consider the amount of support tickets that are dealt with on a daily basis.

3. Yes, we have to sometimes upgrade our phone system and other neato things like to ensure that folks like you can call our customer service folks... so yes, sometimes it is necessary to upgrade the phone system....

4. Yes, we also update plans when new plan arrive for customers, most of the time its processed upon request.

[lnxcode]

Originally Posted by robbynz

Also can you please tell me what your advertising means on your homepage, when it says 'We'll buy out your old contract' when it refers to Transferring your webhosting.

It means if you are hosted on cPanel and are outside the 30 days money back (and your account isn't about to expire) that we will pay up to the sum of $40 credit towards your account from whatever duration is left at your old host.

[robbynz]

Originally Posted by lnxcode

Robbynz - Welcome to the HostICan Community.

1. Alerting system - you are more then welcome to setup your own custom alerting system, which may help you keep tabs on us I think our uptime speaks for itself.

2. We try to answer all tickets within 15 - 30 mins. However, there isn't a guarantee time frame that you will be answered in. I would say the longest I've ever seen a ticket go unanswered is 1 hour. Which isn't exactly long, if you consider the amount of support tickets that are dealt with on a daily basis.

3. Yes, we have to sometimes upgrade our phone system and other neato things like to ensure that folks like you can call our customer service folks... so yes, sometimes it is necessary to upgrade the phone system....

4. Yes, we also update plans when new plan arrive for customers, most of the time its processed upon request.

Thanks, but that doesn't answer all of my questions.

- I asked whether you had a status page, that lists all the servers you have and their loads?
- I asked questions regarding your uptime guarrantee policy. eg. Do you require us to prove that a service was offline by us having to pay for our own monitoring service. Every other host I have used provides this as part of their service so we can see how reliable their servers are.

Also

You state that your 'Uptime speaks for itself', but as someone looking at a hosting company from the outside, I have no idea of your uptime without some sort of monitor to see how reliable your services are?

You also state that you sometimes have to upgrade things, which is fair enough. However does a service have to go offline in order to do this, and don't you have reduncancy and backup systems in case that happens? Does this also apply to server, eg. are your servers clustered and load balanced, so if one of the servers fails and needs taking offline to fix, my websites would remain online?

[robbynz]

Searching your forums, I did come across this page SiteUptime - Website Monitoring Service (Januarys 99.733% doesn't look good)

Does this mean that for January everyone with you would have got a credit, for not reaching 99.9%, or would we have had to contact you to receive the credit? Or is this uptime monitor not relate to all of your servers, and just your own website.

This is the sort of uptime monitor I was meaning in my previous post.

[lnxcode]

Originally Posted by robbynz

- I asked whether you had a status page, that lists all the servers you have and their loads?

Sorry, at this time we don't have such pages, at this time.

Originally Posted by robbynz

- I asked questions regarding your uptime guarrantee policy. eg. Do you require us to prove that a service was offline by us having to pay for our own monitoring service. Every other host I have used provides this as part of their service so we can see how reliable their servers are.

We monitor this ourselves and keep you guys in the loop.

Originally Posted by robbynz

You state that your 'Uptime speaks for itself', but as someone looking at a hosting company from the outside, I have no idea of your uptime without some sort of monitor to see how reliable your services are?

You also state that you sometimes have to upgrade things, which is fair enough. However does a service have to go offline in order to do this, and don't you have reduncancy and backup systems in case that happens? Does this also apply to server, eg. are your servers clustered and load balanced, so if one of the servers fails and needs taking offline to fix, my websites would remain online?

The servers are not clustered, and do not have load balancing, that is only done when you have some hosting providers when they place more customers then they really should on a server which then makes the load balancing fix this problem.

Most hosts don't need this, and don't have it, as they don't place 700 shared hosting accounts per server.

[Scott]

Originally Posted by robbynz

Searching your forums, I did come across this page SiteUptime - Website Monitoring Service (Januarys 99.733% doesn't look good)

Does this mean that for January everyone with you would have got a credit, for not reaching 99.9%, or would we have had to contact you to receive the credit? Or is this uptime monitor not relate to all of your servers, and just your own website.

This is the sort of uptime monitor I was meaning in my previous post.

Robbynz,

I have my HostICan VPS on pingdom.com. I am an affiliate of HostICan and I actually care about my visitors. Therefore, I do independent testing wherever possible even when it means out of pocket expenses.

Anyway, you may wish to take this with a grain of salt, but here's my results of my VPS performance.

Below is the month (2008 unless otherwise mentioned) and below the month is the day and outage duration that was not 100% uptime.

April 99.98% Uptime:
18 351 ms 99.66% 4m 50s
19 329 ms 99.86% 2m 0s


March 99.97% Uptime
3 358 ms 99.96% 33s
22 336 ms 99.24% 10m 59s


February 99.89% Uptime
5 329 ms 99.65% 5m 0s
11 330 ms 97.08% 42m 0s


January 99.77% Uptime
26 348 ms 92.85% 1h 43m


December, 2007 - 99.97% Uptime
15 346 ms 99.96% 33s
25 411 ms 99.12% 12m 44s

Edit: Oops, I forgot to mention this was with 1 minute resolution. Meaning, pingdom sends a request to my server every minute.