“...it occasionally goes down, typically not for long (6 - 15 mins).
In your opinion, how often (per month) does a UK based hosting site have to go down to put it in (a) the better than average category; and (b) the worse than average category?
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Honestly? I would expect 0 minutes of
unscheduled outage per month.
There will always have to be maintenance, and that is why hosting companies have maintenance windows, normally during antisocial hours, like 02.00 etc.
A decent hosting company will have a resilient infrastructure, in otherwords if they have a router failure, then traffic should be seamlessly rerouted through a second device. If a hard drive fails on the server where your website lives, it will be part of a hot swoppable pair or set of drives, meaning you won't even notice.
Unfortunately companies cut corners. On shared servers, they either overload them with websites, or resources are incorrectly allocated, so one person runs a ropey script on their database, hogs all the processor, and brings down all the other websites. On dedicated servers, the resiliant infrastructure isn't configured correctly, or they don't have adequate technical staff that can quickly deal with an issue.
If you are paying for a dedicated server, you should have zero unscheduled downtime. If you are on a shared server, it will depend on what you are paying, but personally I don't think you should have any downtime.
Unfortunately, anyone can rent a server, with very low cost software, partition up a server and then market themselves as hosting company. Some are great, a lot are terrible with little to know customer support or technical ability.
Dohh, starting to rant, so I'll shut up. But it is sad that our US servers stay up year after year without so much as a blip.
That said, touch wood, very impressed so far with Rackspace UK
