Hosts, random failures, and what’s important
I’ve used a few web hosts over the years, and they all suffer random failures1. Hardware dies, power fails, major upgrades are botched, hosts are hit with DDOS storms, and other users fuck things up. It’s really a question of how well the host recovers, how well they keep you informed during the apocalypse, and how great their service is outside of the pain and suffering.
How do the hosts compare? Google.com was down 31 minutes last year, which is pretty damned good (a dandy 99.999+% uptime). Dreamhost2 averages slightly better than 99% uptime3. Rackspace4 averages 99.9+% uptime5.
For a weblog, 1% downtime is a great balance for the price. For a small business system, %0.1 is pretty good, though it costs almost 100x more. Can you imagine what Google’s %0.001+ costs?
- Last night, for example, our expensive work host lost power to their entire site ↩
- A shameless plug for our happy host, who charges us USD$7.95/month ↩
- 1% is about 80 hours/year downtime ↩
- Another host I use, costing about USD$650/month per server ↩
- For the machines I’ve hosted there, I’ve had about 10 hours of downtime per machine per year ↩