Friday 9 April 2010

The sites down! No, it's not...

So, what can be classed as an acceptable up-time for your website?

And more importantly, how can you monitor that you're receiving the service level you expect?

Most external providers will guarantee a 99.99% uptime due to their vast server network and the ability to mirror sites to allow for any unexpected or planned downtime. But what can you expect from an in-house solution?

Personally, 99.99% up-time should be an achievable figure for both external and internal hosting solutions but how do you monitor the level of service you are receiving? Manual monitoring is an option but can be rather intensive on the resources! So, an automated checking service such as IPPatrol or Site Confidence is probably the way forward. It is possible to have an internal system to check your servers but using an external host gives a true representation of your visitors experiences.

It would be interesting to hear what people expect of their service providers, is it unreasonable to expect a service level as high as an external provider from your internal offerings?

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