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100% uptime

No.

Even cloud systems still can mess up and go down, or be hit by a sufficiently large DDoS to cause a noticed downtime.

But most modern hardware in the hands of a competent technician will operate reliably for years on end with very little downtime required, it is possible to hit 100% for months on end. Just do note that in the long run 100% is not sustainable, because your hardware will eventually get old and have to be replaced, introducing a high probability of downtime for upgrades.
 
I agree with Seraphim. Although you could get 100% uptime for months, you'll eventually need to upgrade software, hardware or have a failure somewhere which causes you to loose that 100% uptime.
 
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That is why even though we provide cloud services we only promise 99.5% uptime. "Promise Less Deliver More"
 
I think what people are missing is that it's very possible to have long-term 100% uptime. You just aren't going to get that on a hosting account for $3/mo, or a $5 VPS.

You have to look at sites like Amazon, Google, etc., in that every minute of downtime costs them thousands of dollars. They'll easily pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for their server farms, and come darn close to achieving a permanent state of 100% uptime.

As far as smaller operations, any decent host should be able to provide 99.95% uptime without any difficulty, unless something goes seriously wrong on the server. Anything less than that is simply unacceptable, IMO.
 
@wswd I think you generalize a little to much. As I have been able to offer 99.89 average over the last 409 days

2012 October 100.00 %
2012 September 99.84 %
2012 August 100.00 %
2012 July 99.98 %
2012 June 100.00 %
2012 May 100.00 %
2012 April 99.47 %
2012 March 100.00 %
2012 February 99.92 %
2012 January 100.00 %
2011 December 100.00 %
2011 November 100.00 %
2011 October 99.36 %
2011 September 100.00 %
2011 August 100.00 %

Are plans are starting at a $1.00 for shared hosting and $3.95 for cloud based vps with ssd!
 
99.89% uptime is still not 100% uptime. It's nowhere close. It's on average 47 minutes of downtime every month...10 hours a year. If you are hosting a business making $100/hr. online, guess what? They just lost $1000 for the year.

And of course, you don't guarantee 99.89% uptime or anywhere close to it. ;) If you think you can provide 100% uptime to your $1 clients, then step up to the plate and guarantee that. Reimburse them when you don't meet those figures. I know you'll never do that, becuase you know as well as I do that the generalization I made is absolutely correct. If you want 100% uptime, you will be spending thousands of dollars a month.
 
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We offer $1 shared hosting as well, and real SSD VPSs (not cached and/or resold) for about $4/mo. We also come really close to 100% uptime. In fact, we guarantee 99.99%. However, we know that with our setups, we can't provide 100% uptime. Servers need to be rebooted, RAM needs to be changed out, sometimes a RAID card will need to be replaced, etc. 99.99% gives us about 5 minutes a month to do those things.

If we wanted to offer 100% uptime, or at least add a few more 9's at the end (since even a huge cloud setup isn't going to transfer instantly without any loss of service...it might just be a few seconds, but that's not 100%), it would cost us thousands upon thousands of dollars a month. It would be impossible to cover our costs, without extreme amounts overselling (which is what low-cost cloud providers do), or raising the prices considerably.
 
The big names don't have perfect uptime either. I've caught blips a few times, most noticeably in Yahoo and AOL mail. The regional server for Google was visibly down for me once as well.

But due to their size alone they have to maintain such a large fleet of equipment with regional distributions just to keep up with normal loads, and the load balancing infrastructure required for that to work correctly also is very good at covering up failures.

Should a physical Google server actually fail, the load balancer or cloud manager would notice anywhere from less than a second to a couple of minutes after and stop sending traffic to the failed hardware, making the others take up the slack and automatically dispatching technicians to correct the problem.

That level of sophistication is out there, sufficiently large or mission-critical computing systems rely on it. But it is well out of reach of small or medium businesses in cost alone for the operating scale needed to be effective.

On second thought though, I can name at least one service with a 100% uptime:

DNS roots.

There are so many mirrors of them, and the multicast/anycast routing they use, makes it so that a failure is nigh undetectable by end users because client applications and backend routing will automatically adapt to any faults.
 
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I've been in a discussion like this before, it became heated for some reason...

True 100% uptime is doable, but it's very hard to maintain and can cost a lot of money to do it, but it IS possible.
 
On second thought though, I can name at least one service with a 100% uptime:

DNS roots.

There are so many mirrors of them, and the multicast/anycast routing they use, makes it so that a failure is nigh undetectable by end users because client applications and backend routing will automatically adapt to any faults.

I doubt they have 100% uptime. They have a perceived 100% uptime because any downtime is so small that it's really unnoticeable to the users. There is no failover solution that happens immediately. A server has to go down and a switch to a new one has to be made. There is downtime involved with that, even if it's just a second, or even say 10ths of a second. It's still "downtime" though users may not notice. You can certainly get 99.x% with a lot of 9's after it though.
 
I guess it is possible, cloudflare offers a service that they say would give you 100% uptime, though you have to pay big..
 
I guess it is possible, cloudflare offers a service that they say would give you 100% uptime, though you have to pay big..

They too don't offer 100% uptime (in fact, the entire CloudFlare network has gone down before), and their services really only work for static content, as it serves cached data during downtime. If your physical server is down, CloudFlare won't do anything to help. Sure, it might serve static pages from cache, but what good is that? Is there any website out there these days that doesn't use dynamic content? You'd be hard-pressed to find one.
 
They too don't offer 100% uptime (in fact, the entire CloudFlare network has gone down before), and their services really only work for static content, as it serves cached data during downtime. If your physical server is down, CloudFlare won't do anything to help. Sure, it might serve static pages from cache, but what good is that? Is there any website out there these days that doesn't use dynamic content? You'd be hard-pressed to find one.

https://www.cloudflare.com/business
They claim to have an advanced dos protection layer 7.
And yes, they do offer 100% uptime
 
And yes, they do offer 100% uptime

Really? Then can you explain the downtime their entire network had just a couple months ago???

Secondly, this thread isn't about "dos protection layer 7", whatever the heck that is. As I already mentioned, CDNs cannot serve dynamic content. They simply cache content from your server. If your server is down, nothing is going to work, period.

What does this mean for a host? Cloudflare will be serving static content of your site, but clients will not be able to log in to cPanel, check their email, send email, use FTP, purchase your services, etc. Is that really considered 100% uptime because some static content will be served? You've got to be kidding me! I'm sure it looks great for the stats you give people, but your clients will be gone. You seriously need to research what CDNs do and how they work.
 
100% uptime is positive but some time the hosting company will not guarantee because of hardware problems,
so most of companys will give 99.99% server uptme .
 
Really? Then can you explain the downtime their entire network had just a couple months ago???

Secondly, this thread isn't about "dos protection layer 7", whatever the heck that is. As I already mentioned, CDNs cannot serve dynamic content. They simply cache content from your server. If your server is down, nothing is going to work, period.

What does this mean for a host? Cloudflare will be serving static content of your site, but clients will not be able to log in to cPanel, check their email, send email, use FTP, purchase your services, etc. Is that really considered 100% uptime because some static content will be served? You've got to be kidding me! I'm sure it looks great for the stats you give people, but your clients will be gone. You seriously need to research what CDNs do and how they work.

1st. Downtimes ARE usually caused by DDoS, well then cloudflare's a good solution for it.
2nd. I too do not know what DoS protection layer 7 means, but it sounds convincing, try reading the description of that protection layer SH!T.
3rd. Cloudflare has a lot of features not just caching static contents, they have rocket loaders to speed up your page loads, Asynchronous resource loading to optimize your HTML contents, actually they do have tons of features you can use for your website optimizations. May it be security modules, optimization modules, etc. etc.
4th. The 100% uptime only applies for business and enterprise cf accounts, did you checked the link I posted ? It says:

"Service Level Agreement (SLA) - 100% uptime
Industry standard SLAs often feature 99.999% uptime, also known as the five 9s. At five 9’s your website could be offline for as long as 5 minutes and 26 seconds each year. All CloudFlare Business and Enterprise plans offer guaranteed 100% uptime because we know that anything less than 100% is an impediment to your organization’s success."

https://www.cloudflare.com/business
Uptime checker records 99.999% as 100%

5th.
But clients will not be able to log in to cPanel, check their email, send email, use FTP, purchase your services, etc.

I do not know if you're joking or something, just simple remove the TTL/NS for cPanel record then that's it. ACTUALLY they still can access the cPanel, they just have to simply go to cpanel.URLHERE.com or throught the dedi IP.

6th. OP was just asking if 100% uptime is possible, I answered him with the yes through CF as the solution.
 
1st. Downtimes ARE usually caused by DDoS, well then cloudflare's a good solution for it.
2nd. I too do not know what DoS protection layer 7 means, but it sounds convincing, try reading the description of that protection layer SH!T.
3rd. Cloudflare has a lot of features not just caching static contents, they have rocket loaders to speed up your page loads, Asynchronous resource loading to optimize your HTML contents, actually they do have tons of features you can use for your website optimizations. May it be security modules, optimization modules, etc. etc.
4th. The 100% uptime only applies for business and enterprise cf accounts, did you checked the link I posted ? It says:

"Service Level Agreement (SLA) - 100% uptime
Industry standard SLAs often feature 99.999% uptime, also known as the five 9s. At five 9’s your website could be offline for as long as 5 minutes and 26 seconds each year. All CloudFlare Business and Enterprise plans offer guaranteed 100% uptime because we know that anything less than 100% is an impediment to your organization’s success."

https://www.cloudflare.com/business
Uptime checker records 99.999% as 100%

5th.

I do not know if you're joking or something, just simple remove the TTL/NS for cPanel record then that's it. ACTUALLY they still can access the cPanel, they just have to simply go to cpanel.URLHERE.com or throught the dedi IP.

6th. OP was just asking if 100% uptime is possible, I answered him with the yes through CF as the solution.

Cloudflare does have downtime, both on the individual site level and the infrastructure level. It is not possible to have a 100% uptime - anywhere. Eventually something will happen to cause the site to go offline even if it's ten years down the road.
 
6th. OP was just asking if 100% uptime is possible, I answered him with the yes through CF as the solution.

And again, you are completely incorrect. CloudFlare has had plenty of downtime (on the business/enterprise level as well). I don't think you understand what an SLA means. It means that if that number (in this case 100%) isn't reached, they refund a portion of your money. It doesn't mean they actually achieve 100% uptime. I have 100% SLA from every one of my datacenters as well, but they still have occassional downtime for network maintenance, etc.

Coming from a host (judging by your name), it's kinda scary you don't understand that.
 
And again, you are completely incorrect. CloudFlare has had plenty of downtime (on the business/enterprise level as well). I don't think you understand what an SLA means. It means that if that number (in this case 100%) isn't reached, they refund a portion of your money. It doesn't mean they actually achieve 100% uptime. I have 100% SLA from every one of my datacenters as well, but they still have occassional downtime for network maintenance, etc.

Coming from a host (judging by your name), it's kinda scary you don't understand that.

That means they are confident enough that they'd accomplish 100% uptime..
And you also thought that a user cannot access cpanel when cf is activated ?
And you also thought that all they do was cache static content ?
 
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