Whirlpool

For those of you thinking of using hostmonster.com, be careful about the true meaning of their "99.9% uptime guarantee".

My real online chat with their billing department follows:

Visitor Name: mydomain.com
Question: Hello. Approximately 20 hours ago, my domains were down for around 2 hours. I called and the support person said this was due to one of your routers being re-located. As you offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, will there be a partial refund to compensate me for the downtime?
IP Address: XXXXXXXXXX
Browser Information: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Capture Information:

Support: Welcome to our real-time support area, I would be happy to answer any questions you may have. Please type your question and I will be with you as soon as possible.
mydomain.com: Hello?
mydomain.com: My question is above....
Support: Unfortunately we do not offer refunds in the event of downtime, I am sorry
mydomain.com: ok, in that case, can you explain the meaning of "99.9% uptime guarantee" ?
Support: we mantain an uptime of 99.9% across all of our servers
mydomain.com: yes, and in what way do you "guarantee" 99.9% ?
mydomain.com: if you offer no guarantee, why not just change your material to read "100%"
Support: because we do not maintain 100% uptime throught all of our servers
Support: we do, however maintain 99.9%
Support: that is an average of all of our 200+ servers
mydomain.com: that is commendable....so in what way is your "guarantee" backed in the event service falls below 99.9% ?
Support: it does not
Support: that is not what we mean by garauntee
mydomain.com: thank you, that is the answer I was after.

They didn't seem very helpful for you I would recommend moving to a new host.

Sounds like the "support" person was a brainless drone. Totally not helpful.

This particular hoster seems to be offering a lot for not very much - which means that I would expect to be disappointed over support and delivery on promises at some stage.

In that context, this could be a good time to look at what good a 'guarantee' is and what it might mean...

For example - of the hosters that offer a "Guaranteed Uptime", how many of them state precisely the period of time that the Guaranteed percentage covers - and whether it is an a per account, per machine, or per facility basis . Is it 99.9% of each minute, hour, month, or year. 99.9% of a year is 8.76 hours. That could be in one outage and still meet the Guarantee... Not really very good - but to expect that they will be up for 99.9% of every single hour is nor realistic. Certainly a 2 hour outage would not breach their Guarantee if it was stated to be on a per-annum basis. Even less of a breach if the weasel words in the 'Guarantee' are based on total served hours across the facility...

I have learnt to ignore 'Guaranteed Uptime' claims in hosting or Voip these days unless there is an SLA attached that sets out in detail the terms of the claim, and your recourse as a client, should an outage occur. It is significant that this is usually only offered by the higher end hosters - and the cost of it is reflected in the price of the service.

Someone else can do the maths but i wonder how long one server would have to be down while the other 199 were all up before the overall average fell below 99.9% :)

Angus. writes...

Someone else can do the maths but i wonder how long one server would have to be down while the other 199 were all up before the overall average fell below 99.9% :)

Asuming all other 199 are 100% and using a mean as the averaging method...

80% uptime on the other 1 machine would give 99.9% uptime so anything less would drop the mean below 99.9%

they could be sneakily using a mode averaging system though in which case 101 machines would need to drop to the same level below 99.9% to trigger it.

edit:to put that 20% downtime into perspective, it's a little over 72 days (taking into account a 365.25 day year)

You won't find very many "shared hosting" companies at all who offer that sort of service in regards to refunding for downtime. Normally you'll have to enter into a huge legal agreement, and you most likely would be phoning your account manager directly rather than posting on whirlpool if you had that sort of hosting plan. ;)

Sucks your host was down for 20 hours, but I don't think it's unreasonable what they have said, read the fine print!

I am sorry, but this is just ridiculous. A pro-rata refund for 2 hours downtime on a $4.95 per month hosting account is $0.01375 cents.

Will that be cash or cheque?

You get what you pay for matey.

Michael McGoogan writes...

You get what you pay for matey.

LOL how true

Can it be credited back to a card :)

Michael McGoogan writes...

I am sorry, but this is just ridiculous.

Michael, alfom has a legitimate complaint. that 1.3 cents is his right and you can't deny it. 1.3 cents might not seem like a lot of money to you but alfom will live like a king this month if he gets his refund.

phil@netxp writes...

Michael, alfom has a legitimate complaint. that 1.3 cents is his right and you can't deny it. 1.3 cents might not seem like a lot of money to you but alfom will live like a king this month if he gets his refund.

I'd get a cheque off them for that amount purely to frame it.

Hehehe, 1.3 cents is great.
Lemme see, that buys nearly one minute of voip talktime on PennyTel :-)

My post was supposed to alert people to meaningless guarantees rather than the monetary aspects.

alfom writes...

My post was supposed to alert people to meaningless guarantees rather than the monetary aspects.

arguing over 1.3 cents? what sort of person argues over 1.3c? you signed up for a $6 a month service don't expect to be treated like a king

well as a host myself i might be the only "stupid" host to do this but i will give discounts on downtime if exceeds more then 2hrs without atlest 48hrs notice and i dont put on 99.9% uptime guarantee or anything my site.

and if its a day you get a day extra on your billing if more then 3 days you get the month free and some other goodies eg space but yes never trust a host unlesss they are willing to sign and state what there 99.9% uptime guarantee includes.

so am i a stupid host?

but just to even this out there "relocating" router may be something they needed to do.

id think a router relocation would have been shedueled dowtime anyway, and you would have to be crazy not to include in your TOS that the uptime guarantee doesnt cover shedueled maintenance.

and wheelie, you must have a flexible billing system, what are you using?

Wheelie87 writes...

so am i a stupid host?


Not at all - if thats your business plan go for it.

The stupid hosts are those that advertise meaningles performance stats and guarantees.

We offer a 99.5% SLA and will refund an entire months hosting should we fall below this uptime. Only on one occasion have we had to do this when one of our older Sun Enterprise 250 servers ended up with 6 melted hard drives.

we are using clienexec which is not the best cause you cant add credit and you have to manually add in the extra days (grr) not so great,

due to that i will be upgrading to modernbill this weekend unsure if i go v4 or v5

Wheelie87 writes...

unsure if i go v4 or v5

id steer clear of 5 atm, its still a buggy POS.

Cant wait till its fully stable and less buggy, looks to have alot of potential

Wheelie87 writes...

but just to even this out there "relocating" router may be something they needed to do.

I assume from this that the server was still up then.

Just cause you can't talk to it doesn't mean it is down.

No 1.3 cents for you!

Michael McGoogan writes...

is $0.01375 cents.

How can it be $0.01375 then 0.01375 cents? which one is it?