For the majority of businesses and enterprising sole proprietors, having a reliably available commerce website is critical to their operations anymore. When these outfits go looking for a web hosting firm, they commonly expect that their website in question will be available to potential web visitors as close to twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, as possible. Unfortunately, due to a variety of factors, some of which are beyond their control, web hosting companies simply are not one hundred percent perfect. So in order to entice a business or sole proprietor to keep their website with the firm, these web hosting providers offer uptime guarantees, or SLA’s for the website owners.
An SLA is literally a Service Level Agreement that pertains to the customer of any virtual private server, or VPS. In this agreement, the hosting provider firm states the percentage of the time which they guarantee that a business or individual’s website will be available to potential customers. This is also known as an uptime guarantee. Many novices in the Internet hosting world are at once stunned and dismayed to learn that in the technologically advancing age in which the world finds itself, a website can not be guaranteed to be up and running one hundred percent of the time. In fact, web hosting companies do manage to keep virtual private servers up and running generally anywhere from 99.5% to 99.99% of the time.
These figures start to reassure the customer when he or she hears such impressive sounding percentages thrown around in the uptime guarantee. But stop and think about what these percentages translate to in real time over a given thirty day month. What the SLA is telling the customers is that they may suffer from a down website for as much as a half of a percent to a hundredth of a percent of all the hours in the given month. Where an uptime guarantee of 99.5% is concerned, this is really stating that they business or person’s website could actually be down for a whole two hundred and sixteen minutes during the month. Suddenly 99.5% does not sound so impressive anymore. Firms which uptime guarantee 99.9% are doing better, telling the customer that in a typical thirty day month, the user’s website will only be down for up to forty-three minutes. And, the SLA’s which guarantee an uptime of 99.99% are promising that the website of the customers in question will be unavailable for a mere four point three minutes a month.
The point of such an SLA and uptime guarantee is not simply that a person will not have to pay for the time in which their website is down. The promise is that the business or individual will actually be compensated for the loss potentially incurred WHILE the website is down. Here is where the SLA fine print turns out to be so critically important. If the company is not literally offering compensation for the down time, then this so called uptime guarantee is not worth the marketing paper on which it is printed.
It is important to note that most of these web hosting server companies did not survive in this business being fools, or readily giving away money. They are not monitoring the business or individual’s website down time so that they can reimburse the customer as fast as possible. They do keep track of this information, for their own purposes, records, and benefit. In fact, if a customer does not monitor his or her own down time figures, so that the person is able to request the compensation, then it will likely not be offered at all. This is where observation and good record keeping come in handy where a business or individual’s virtual private server and the accompanying web hosting service provider are concerned.
All of this boils down to a central point in picking out a web hosting service provider. When deciding which company to trust for the business or individual’s VPS, one should not only contemplate the cost, brand name, and statistics which are bandied around. The fine print of the contract must be carefully and closely examined to understand what exactly such numbers signify, as well as if such outfits prove to be so real and stable as the marketing brochure claims. In following such advice, the individual’s business will likely stay online more of the time.