Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Test Your Web Hosting Company Uptime Before Buying the Hosting Plan

By Bedrich Omacka

When you are going to pay for web hosting service you should make sure that the hosting company has potential to keep your website accessible for most of the time. The only way how to avoid troubles caused by downtime is checking web hosting company uptime before you buy the hosting plan. In this article, I am going to explain how to do that most effectively.

Basically, there are two ways how to monitor the web hosting uptime. You can use either desktop application or some of many online monitoring services. What is the difference?

Using online service is the easiest way. You can find some websites offering uptime stats in google. The advantage of this solution is the possibility to see statistics for many months or maybe years back. The time period depends only on the date when the web host begun to be monitored. When you come across uptime monitoring services you will probably notice slightly different results. The reason of such difference can be another checking interval. While some websites check the web hosting uptime every 5 minutes, there are others which do the same in 60 minutes interval. From this reason I suggest to take some time and find a service with lower checking intervals.

You will probably find out that these intervals are a little longer than you preffer. The good solution may be to download some free monitoring software which can be run on your desktop. This way you have all settings including the intervals under the control . Set one minute intervals and add URL of web hosts you are going to compare. The disadvantage of this method is impossibility to get data for a long period of the time (I expect you will not wait full year before you sign up with some hosting company). On the other side the current uptime is more important then one year old stats because many companies may get new owner or more servers and this can impact their uptime.


Click here for web hosting service providing 99.9% uptime monitored by third parties since 2006.

You can check out their uptime at http://www.marblehost.com/uptime-guarantee.php

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