There are many different monitoring services on the Internet, and we’d trialled pretty much most of them in order to find the “right” one for us.  Many of them did what they claimed to do, and did it well, but we always felt they were lacking something vital. It wasn’t until we trialled Panopta that we realised just how little control and monitoring the other companies gave you. Almost immediately, we’d discovered the right guys (and/or gals) for the job.

The team behind Panopta are fantastic people, and have been very receptive to our feedback and suggestions on how to potentially further improve their service. Today, they announced that due to popular feedback from their clients, they’ve added some wonderful new reporting information that helps us to show our clients what’s going on under the hood.

If you haven’t seen it already, for the last few months at the footer navigation of our website has been a link to our uptime reports. This page is hosted on the Panopta network (bar a few cosmetic items which are hosted with us) which means that you can safely bookmark it for reference if you think we’re currently experiencing network or server issues. Before todays updates, you could only see the current months uptime, the total uptime in general, and whether or not a server was up or down. These new updates now allow us to provide you with much more in-depth monitoring information:

Historical Availability

As the name suggests, now you can see previous months uptime reports to get a much better idea on the reliability of our service and/or a particular server. We feel this is important not only so that potential new clients can get a good overview of how reliable we are, but also so that we as a host can see potential “problem areas” and review past outages or issues that contributed to the downtime, so that we can better act upon them in future.

Current Status

Current status has now been expanded so that you can see if a particular service is up or down. This is extremely beneficial from a support point of view, as now all customers are able to see whether or not a service is up or down before reporting a potential outage.

Recent Outages

This is perhaps my favourite addition, and one that I imagine many hosts will be shuddering at the thought of. All recent outages are reported here, along with when they started and how long they lasted.

This, again, I feel is an absolutely vital tool as a hosting provider. Now we are able to see when outages occured and which services were affected, so that we can correlate the downtime to particular issues on servers and use this information to prevent the same issue from happening again in the future.

Conclusion

All in all, these changes don’t mean a great deal for our clients in terms of service except that they can now see more information about potential downtime or server problems. We’ve never been a company to hide the facts (or figures), and we feel that as paying clients you deserve to know exactly when your service is or isn’t working.

These changes are really geared towards allowing us to provide you with a better service. Now we have a far greater overview of our network (and one that is set to improve in the future, with the help of people like Panopta) we can periodically review any downtime that occurs and plan how we can reduce it in the future.

We strongly recommend Panopta if you’re looking for any outage monitoring or notification services. Thanks guys!

6 Month Recap

It’s been around 6 months since our public launch, and we’re extremely happy with how things have progressed up until this point. We’ve made a few positive changes (such as increasing our packages) and all in all believe that so far we have established a service that our clients can be extremely happy with, not only from a hosting performance and reliability perspective, but also from a customer service and support perspective. But… there’s always room for improvement. We absolutely welcome any and all feedback from our existing clients, and we invite you to tell us how we can provide you with the best hosting service around. Even if your suggestion involves an extremely complex new system that could take us 6 months to develop and put into production; we’d like to hear it.

A Little Extra

When looking at our packages page, I noticed that compared to the amount of diskspace and bandwidth that we were offering, the number of subdomain and addon domains we provided wasn’t really balanced. I’ve now increased these to try and obtain a better ratio of space and bandwidth, and believe these to be much more in line. As always, existing customers will receive these changes immediately.

Faster than MediaTemple VPS’s?

It’s not often that our clients actually test the performance of our servers and compare them against their existing hosting, so it was nice to see this post on our forums, informing us that our shared hosting server “Elisha” outperforms their existing $150/month VPS from MediaTemple. MediaTemple are an extremely large and well known hosting company, so this was a hugely positive comment.

As our Why Us? states, we use powerful hardware to ensure that performance is top notch. Additionally, we also continually monitor and adjust our servers for optimum performance - something very few hosts do. Why should shared hosting have to be slower than dedicated? We don’t believe it has to be at all.

Thanks for the report, daniel!

Help Spread the World

Many of you will have been customers of ours now for several months, and we’d like to ask you to help get the word out about ThisWebHost. It’s certainly no mystery that the best form of advertising is direct or word of mouth advertising. With your help, we can grow this* substantially and improve upon every aspect of our hosting further.

Please consider taking a few minutes of your time to write a review of our hosting. Places like WebHostingTalk are fantastic communities that have “real” feedback from real clients, and are completely invaluable from a marketing perspective.

If you have a blog, please blog about us or mention us in one of your posts. If you use Twitter, feel free to twit about us. If you frequent a forum and somebody asks which host you recommend, please spare a thought for us.

Anything you can do to help spread the word about us is heavily appreciated. So much so that… who knows? Maybe we’ll reward you for it (yes, seriously). Let us know where you’ve helped tell the world about ThisWebHost!

Whilst working on these products, we’ve managed to cut some of our local disk space and bandwidth usage on all servers dramatically. We sat around contemplating what to do with these additional resources, and out of the two suggestions we had, we’d decided that creating a Paris Hilton Fanclub perhaps wasn’t the best choice. Instead, we’ve decided to pass these savings back to you.

Effective immediately, all current and future hosting accounts have had 50% disk space and 50% bandwidth added to them. If you’re an existing reseller, you’ll also see these resources added to your accounts.

Thank you for hosting with this*. If you aren’t an existing client, now would be a good time

Communication is a very important part of what we’re all about at ThisWebHost, and we like to keep our existing and potential clients informed of how things are progressing, as well as outline our plans for the future. As it stands, right now we have some very big things lined up in the way of new products for the remainder of the year, and we’re absolutely positive you’ll love them.

The first, and perhaps my favourite of these products, should be released within the next 4-8 weeks providing development goes according to plan. Regrettably I can’t say much about this product at this stage, except that it (in the opinion of myself and those asked) may prove absolutely indispensable, and should certainly make you feel even more confident about hosting with this*! I’m really looking forward to hearing your feedback after launch, so expect to hear something soon.

Don’t forget that we also have the official ThisWebHost Forums online, so if you have any questions, concerns or comments, you’re more than welcome to raise them there.

In other news, we are now offering dedicated (or “unique”) IP addresses for hosting accounts if required. Some users have illustrated interest in this not only for reverse DNS purposes, but also to give their site the appearance of dedicated hosting. This product can be added during checkout, or added to existing hosting accounts within the client area.

In more important news, we’ve just added Moneybookers as a payment option. If you currently live in a country that PayPal doesn’t currently support, we hope that we can now accomodate you. If you’d like us to add any more payment options, please get in touch.

If you hadn’t already guessed by our “Guide to hosting” articles - at this* we’re different. We don’t hide behind small-print, and we certainly don’t try and mislead you. When we decide to offer free trials, they are just that, absolutely 100% free with no need to enter any payment information at all. Why offer a “money back guarantee” when you can just give away a free months hosting?

So, for a limited time only we’re giving away a 1 month free trial to our Starter/Blog package. What’s the catch? There isn’t one. You don’t need to enter ANY payment information at all during checkout - only a uniquely generated coupon code which gives you that all important first month for free. You’ll receive exactly the same awesome level of support from our engineers as a paying customer - including having your existing site transferred if you’d like. There are no hidden restrictions on these accounts, and they are exactly as you see on our packages page.

If after 1 month you’re happy with your service and you’d like to stay, that’s great - you’ll receive an invoice and all you have to do is pay it to continue to be hosted with us. If for some reason you’re not happy with the service, or you’d simply just like to host elsewhere, that’s fine. You’ll have access to your data for 7 days so you can prepare to transfer somewhere else.

If you’re interested in participating then please respond to this blog post requesting your free trial code. Because we’ve advertised this promotion elsewhere (in various forums and what not), trials will be limited to the first 10 interested responses only. The coupon codes you’re given are only valid for up to 48 hours, so please only request them if you actually intend to use them.

For those who have been interested in our articles on web hosting, thanks for your feedback. We’re currently working on part 3, and it should be up this week coming.

Failure *is* An Option
“100% uptime” does not exist. I’ll say it again, “100% uptime” does not exist. Offering “100% uptime” is like offering a “100% life” guarantee - it doesn’t make sense.

Nothing lasts forever, and in the world of technology, we as consumers are probably doubly more aware of that fact. Things can and will just stop working for no reason at all, and web hosting is no exception. Every web host on the planet will, at at least one point in their lifespan, experience some form of downtime. When you’re dealing with hardware it’s an inevitability. Hardware aside, there are numerous factors (some even beyond the hosts control) that can occur, making websites unavailable.

To promote and offer the concept of “100% uptime” is very misleading and essentially false advertising. What we need to look at here is basically the small print.

How do they offer or guarantee 100% uptime then? What is it?
“100% uptime” is a concept developed by try and indicate to the user that “your site will never go down” if you use their service. The problem here is that your definition of “down” and the hosts definition of “down” are usually two very, very different things.

Offering “100% uptime” is theoretically possible, if nothing does go down, but this can only last for so long. There are multiple points of failure for any web hosting company, and it’s only a matter of time before one of these points makes itself known.

The real issue with the “100% uptime” claim is that as a user, you will rarely know what it’s actually covering.

Server or Network Uptime?
Here’s something that most customers won’t know or realise…The “uptime guarantee” that the majority of web hosts refer to is actually based upon the network uptime and not the server uptime. You won’t find this in any small print within the terms and conditions, because it’s left deliberately vague.

What’s the difference between network and server uptime? Providing the network that the server is connected to remains fully functional and accessible, anything can happen to the individual server and not be covered by this guarantee. That’s right, if (for example) the disks in the server die and it takes 24 hours to replace and restore your website, this may not be covered by the guarantee.

Because it is notoriously difficult to ensure or guarantee the uptime on a shared server, particularly when hundreds of users may be sharing it, it is therefore easier (and more logical from a marketing point of view) to stamp the uptime guarantee on the network itself. Unfortunately, in the real world, it’s a pretty much useless guarantee if the server is dead.

How do you actually define uptime?
When monitoring a server, there are various things you can monitor:

Ping - Is the servers network active and online (generally used to determine if the server is powered on and
receiving network requests)?

Web - Is the web service open and accepting connections?

Web Page Display - Is the server actually accepting connections and displaying static (HTML) pages?

Web Page Dynamic Display - Is the server actually accepting connections, and displaying dynamic (PHP/MySQL) pages without errors?

As you can see, “uptime” is a very sketchy definition. Whilst the server may respond to pings, be online, and serving up webpages… if MySQL is down and your site is spewing out database connection errors, you and I would both consider this downtime. Your host, however, probably wouldn’t.

The definition of uptime is ultimately down to your host, and not you. Hosts offering “100% uptime” are generally referring to the network and not the server or services on that server. If in doubt, contact them and get it in writing. It’s important to establish just what uptime is to see if the guarantee actually means anything.

Uptime Monitoring - The Facts Don’t Match
The problem with providing the guarantee on network and not server uptime is that it’s relatively impossible from a client perspective to distinguish between the two. Even when the network is legitimately down from your end, your web host could claim that it isn’t, and it’s the server that is down. You have no real way of verifying or proving this to them.

Occasionally, web hosts will have their own uptime statistics or service monitoring utilities on their website. These are, for all purposes, completely biased and should be totally ignored unless they come from a trustworthy third party source. Most of these tools will be reporting incorrect statistics either because they’ve been hard-coded to lie and say services are up when they’re not (who really wants to tell the world they’re experiencing downtime?), or their tools are run locally and don’t identify network issues.

Because everything on the Internet travels across different networks, maintained by different people and stored at various different places on the planet, these links can sometimes go down and cause problems for specific groups of people. For example, your web hosts network may use a particular link that goes down, causing your site to be inaccessible to all US AOL customers. If your host is monitoring network uptime on a server that is also on the same network as your existing server, this problem will not be detected, and everything will appear to be fine. Whilst network uptime is in most cases not your hosts fault, and is the fault of their bandwidth provider, their statistics will prove inaccurate and will conflict with your own.

To gain a true representation of network uptime, you need to monitor servers from several remote sources. This will identify any potential network issues from both ends, and you can get a much clearer picture of what’s really going on. There are a few services out there on the Internet that provide this, so I suggest if you’re interested, you Google around for some research. I don’t really want to recommend any individual services here because I believe in others making their own minds up based on the information they find.

Unfortunately, the majority of hosts will only rely upon their statistics when dealing with any type of guarantee. This is quite logical in case the monitoring site or source is experiencing issues and is misreporting downtime, but it can make it very difficult as a client to receive your guaranteed refund or account credit.

Another thing to consider is, how often is uptime actually monitored? Every 1 minute? 5 minutes? 15 minutes? Most hosts that I’ve encountered will perform monitoring every 5 minutes at least. 5 minutes can be a heck of a long time if your extremely popular website is down. What if you experience an issue within that 5 minute timeframe, and the server automatically restarts the failed service before the next monitor? This would essentially mean the server or site was never down. Not according to your host anyway.

What about the 99.9% guarantees?
This, again, is tough to comment on. What exactly does the uptime cover - server or network? Does it cover services? How is it monitored exactly?

0.1% downtime equates to roughly 43 minutes of downtime in any calendar month. 43 minutes is more than enough time to restart services and fix/solve basic issues, but anything more severe may require hours to resolve. If, for example, any significant hardware fails - then 43 minutes is not going to be long enough to replace them, test them, and get everything back online. If anything significant occurs, will they honour their guarantee and admit the downtime? Will they refund or credit you? Try to find out from existing or previous customers if they do.

Who cares, as long as they fix any problems?
As with the overselling, it can be a question of ethics. Do you want to host with someone who promises you something they can’t deliver, and misleads you with guarantees that don’t cover just what you think they cover?

If you were faced with choosing 2 hosts; one who offered “100% uptime - guaranteed” and another who offered “95% uptime”, which would you choose? Most of you would naturally choose the 100% host because not only does it seem like they’re more reliable, you’re also drawn in by the fact that if it does go down, you can get something out of the deal. But if you can’t get something back because it’s network uptime they guarantee, what’s the point? You may as well have gone with the honest “95% uptime” host after all.

Conclusion
Hosting companies don’t like to admit downtime. We know it happens and they know it happens, but it’s almost taboo to mention it. In a “100% uptime” marketed world, anything less makes you seem inferior than your competitors and that can lose you business.

Offering a “100% uptime” guarantee is basically like writing a blank check, and that’s not something most people in a normal state of mind would do. For a business to do that is almost commercial suicide, especially when selling a service so potentially unstable.

The real concern though, shouldn’t be with uptime figures and guarantees, it should be with how your host handles and responds to any downtime it experiences. Will they publicise their downtime and admit to the issues they experience? Will they keep you informed (time permitting) when they expect the service to return? Customer service and communication is key here. Remember, when you’re faced with downtime the last thing you really care about is the guarantee. Getting your site back up and running becomes the priority.

Given how there are literally hundreds of thousands of web hosts on the Internet today, how the heck do you find the right one for you? How do you spot the genuine and reliable ones from those new startups who have no idea what they’re doing? I’m going to (hopefully) give you some idea and information on what to look for and how to decrease your chances of being ripped off with poorer hosts.

These guides can be quite long, so I’m going to post them in parts for ease of reading.

Part 1. Overselling.

The basics
Overselling is essentially the act of selling more than you are able or capable of providing to the end user, simply because a web host knows that they won’t use it. It plays on the mindset that most clients want as much as possible for as little as possible, despite never using it. It’s a bit like buying a high performance sports car and using it for domestic purposes. You’re sold on the image that you have all this power, but you can never use it. Attempt to use it and you’ll either get into a nasty accident and crash (like a server), or you’ll have your license taken away (be suspended for “excessive resource usage on a shared host”).

To really understand what overselling is, how it works, and why it’s a problem, we need to look at the hard facts and mathematics.

Disk Space
Ever seen an advert for a host offering perhaps 50GB, 100GB or even 200GB disk space? Ever wondered how they can offer that at sub-10$ prices? Quite simply they can’t. They can offer it to you, but you’ll never be able to use it. If you even come close to using it, they will (generally) terminate your account and claim that your site has grown far too busy, and that you’ll need to upgrade to a VPS, or dedicated server.

Disk Space Facts:
Disk space is a limited commodity. Disks only come in certain capacities, and you can only house so many of them in a server. Once you’ve filled up your disks, and you can’t add any more to the system, there is NOTHING you can do to obtain more space except delete existing files. There is NO SUCH THING as “UNLIMITED DISK SPACE”. It’s simply a physical improbability, and nothing more than a marketing term. “Unlimited” roughly translated means “We don’t want to advertise a fixed figure, but use too much and we’ll terminate your account”.

For examples sake, let us suppose that the host we are dealing with has 2TB (2000GB) of disk space in the server we are on, and that we’ve purchased a 200GB space account. Mathematically, this means that the host could only store 10 user accounts on that server without overselling.

2000(GB or 2TB) / 200(GB) = 10

This is on the assumption that every account on that server will be allowed to, and can use up to their maximum disk space allowance of 200GB. This is logical because after all, they’ve paid for that space right? But wait…10 clients per server? This can’t be very profitable for the hosting company, can it? It’s not at all, and this is where overselling comes into play.

Of that 200GB space package, most accounts will barely reach even 1% usage (2GB). If we re-do the calculations based upon a 2GB disk space usage instead of the maximum theoretical of 200GB, we see far different results:

2000(GB or 2TB) / 2(GB) = 1000

Wow! That’s an additional 990 accounts we could store on that server, and that’s 990 times more revenue we can earn in the process! Let’s oversell! It’s a very easy trap to get into, and a trap that almost all web hosts fall foul of.

Can you see the problem with this yet? Should any individual or multiple user(s) use more than the estimated 1% of their disk space, the calculations simply don’t add up any more, and the server may experience issues. In some cases it might even run out of disk space. To prevent this from happening, a lot of hosts will suspend or terminate the accounts that use more than this calculated percentage, giving them a variety of excuses. Not all hosts do this, and some will simply move those top user accounts to a different server.

Bandwidth
Bandwidth is similar to disk space, but actually has to be looked at in terms of physical network performance. Because networks don’t have a hard set data transfer limit, we have to look at what they’re actually capable of transferring from a speed perspective.

Most servers are connected via a 100Mbit port. For those of you who aren’t networking-savvy, don’t worry too much about this because the figures will be shown below. Because all bandwidth quotas are displayed in bytes and not bits, we need to convert this accordingly. Fortunately, that’s pretty easy for us as it’s roughly a division of ten. A 100Mbit port has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of approximately 10 megabytes a second, excluding overheads. There are always overheads, so let’s drop this figure down to a “safe” 9 megabytes a second.

Let’s assume that this port is constantly in use, and at its maximum capacity 24 hours a day.

9 (megabytes a second) * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours = 777600 megabytes

This works out to an approximate maximum transfer capacity of 776GB a day. In a one month period, this works out:

776(GB) * 30 days = 23280(GB) or 23.280TB

Now we’ve crunched the numbers, let’s assume that our hosting company that gave us 200GB disk space also gave us 15TB bandwidth per month. We can see quite clearly from the numbers that it’s possible to provide 15TB, but ONLY if we are the only customer using that connection or port. Unfortunately, we’re not. With a potential for thousands of other clients to be using that connection at the same time, our chances of actually reaching that figure diminish drastically every second. It is, yet again, another marketing ploy. It’s just another way to say “We have no set hard limit on how much bandwidth you can use, but if you use too much, we’ll cut you off”. 15TB looks better on paper than 60GB, after all.

“UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH” is also a complete myth. Using our figures we’ve quite clearly shown that there is a limit on the speed of the transfer through a network, so resultingly there is also a theoretical limit on how much data you CAN potentially transfer. This is something that conveniently most hosts neglect to mention.

Generally speaking again, hosting companies do not expect a single client to use anything more than up to 3-5% of their potential bandwidth allowance. Using more than this will potentially result in more account terminations and the attempt to sell you a dedicated service.

Why is overselling a problem ?
For some it’s a question of ethics. Do you really want to be the customer of a host who lies about the packages they offer? Can your business really survive under the observation of a company who may cut you off at any moment for using “too much” of a package that you clearly paid for? It’s a huge potential risk for anyone that makes money from their website.

For others it’s a question of performance. Sharing a server with many hundreds, or thousands of other people can seriously impact the performance of your website. All it would take is a handful of rogue users to run some badly coded scripts, and they could bring the entire server down. Do you really want to host somewhere that’s so heavily oversold? Statistically, the more accounts on a server, the higher the potential for downtime and server failures.

How do I spot overselling?
It can be very difficult to spot overselling, depending on how severe it is. Generally if you see a host offering high packages for next to nothing, they’re overselling. If you see fairly good packages at insanely low prices (around $1/month) - they’re overselling.

The fact is that hosting costs money. Servers, staff, bandwidth, disks, replacement and backup hardware…it all costs money, and we’re not talking about pocket change here. If you pay $1/month for hosting then you should expect the same as if you paid $100 for a car. If it works fine without any problems for a period of time, then that’s great, you’re lucky. When it experiences problems, don’t be surprised if you receive little or no support at all.

Not every host oversells, and not every host charging $1/month for hosting packages is going to provide you with little or no support. The intent of this part of my guide was to inspire you to think carefully about what goes on “behind the scenes”. Remember, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is…

All new clients will automatically obtain the new doubled packages, as per our order page.