When shopping for web hosting, you will find that most providers state that they provide 99.9% uptime. On the surface this sounds like it should provide a good deal of reassurance, unless you step back and really consider to what that 0.1% of "acceptable" downtime equates.

Being past 2 a.m. here, I am turning to Google to inform me that 1 year = 8 765.81277 hours. So, for the sake of ease, with a total of 8766* hours in a year, the downtime associated with a measly .1% equals approximately 8.75 hours. To many this amount of time over a year may not sound mission critical, unless those hours occur in a single stretch…and that brings me to my point of bitterness and the fuel that is feeding this rant.

I have always been happy with my hosting provider over the past three years of service, however my dedicated server is now on its 18th hour of being offline. Having spent a good deal of time on the phone with their outsourced tech support staff (and my clients...) over the past day, I am now being told that it will be an additional six hours before the server is back online (no word if the data is all there or not). Even more annoying is that their “24 hour” tech support does not mean there is anyone available that can actually fix a problem…just a rep to state “they are looking into it”. On top of all that, they will not share WHAT crippled the server.

Ending my personal rant, make sure to checkout hosting providers Terms and Conditions. Even if they claim 99.9% uptime, it does NOT mean they will actually take responsibility for far greater outages…or even the quality of their service in general.

And with that, I’m going to bed…

May the server gods burninate them.