Over the past few months, I have had numerous discussions with webhost resellers about the issue of "Uptime Guarantee or Commitment". From an end user perspective e.g. website client, I can definitely understand why you would want some type of uptime guarantee; however, if you are the webhost reseller with just a reseller account and do not your own or control the server, how can you honor the uptime guarantee?

I'm very curious to hear other people thoughts and comments on this simple but very explosive issue.

It is always a risk to offer an uptime guarantee. As a reseller, if you decide to offer a guarantee you need to make sure that you can personally afford to pay the refunds or make up the shortage when making your payment.

I personally never offered an uptime guarantee. In the few times that I did have a serious outage, I offered discounts on the next month payment to those that were effected and noticed the outage. The only exception was when one of my servers had a hard drive failure and the data center took over 6 hours to replace. I provided everybody with a discount on their next payment.

Simple: monetary. The TOS just details the credits/refunds given should uptime fall below certain levels.

As such, any host can "guarantee" any uptime level it desires (equal or less than 100% of course). The upstream provider doesn't have to offer an uptime guarantee.

I am not understanding something about the question. If you are a reseller of ABC Hosting Company that offers uptime guarantee, shouldn't you in inherit the same uptime guarantee toward your own customers?

I am not a web host business ... but I do host sites at no charge for a few of my friends. So I do feel a responsibility to have their sites always online.

When I am compelled to look for a new reseller account ... I pretty much ignore any kind of uptime guarantee's. Most company's that have them have a way of "getting around" things if the servers are offline for a while anyway.

Like ... I was with one host a number of years ago whose server was offline for a month. I did not get any kind of refund or nothing. Their claim was ... during the previous 12 months, even with the 1 month downtime, they were still within the parameters of their 99% uptime guarantee. Oh ... and same company only recognized a downtime as something longer than 6 hours. Apparently ... their fine print had fine print.

Now ... I check a company's reputation, and recommendations from others ... and to heck if there is a guarantee on uptime or not. Any good web host will "do the right thing" for his customers if their sites are offline for a length of time. Uptime guarantee or not.

JMHO
Peter

The TOS of the reseller must be at least as restrictive as the one of the upstream provider, for obvious reasons. However, it doesn't have to be as lax. For example, even if the upstream provider does allow adult content, the reseller may very well disallow it. The same goes for network uptime guarantees and server uptime guarantees.

Of course though, this depends on the exact reseller scheme. I believe there are reseller schemes that are little more than an affiliate programs, and the "reseller" has little control over most of the reseller website and package details.

As a hosting company offering uptime guarantee works well as a marketing ploy to attract clients, but the point is do the hosts really offer the uptime they claim? As a host if you claim to offer a specified percentage of uptime and if you fail to honour it, then you should compensate the client according to the no. of hours of downtime.

If you can keep your guarantee that server will be online for xx.x% of the time, by all means, offer a guarantee to clients. It will make them feel slightly better knowing their provider can backup their claims of uptime, and if not, there's some monetary compensation involved.

If you do offer an uptime guarantee, make sure you're not crediting your client's accounts every month. Make sure you have spare hardware, rsynced/RAID backups, extra RAM, motherboards, power supplies, etc. If hardware fails on one of your machines and you don't have a quick replacement, you could be out a lot of money. If something goes wrong, you need to fix it right away.

Oh -- and probably the most important : make sure you actually have the money to cover a guarantee.

Artashes offers a good point. If you are indeed a reseller yourself, you should honor the same guarantee that your hosting provider offers you. You are, in fact, on their servers.

Hope this helps.

What happens if the host isn't who you think they are, don't honor the SLA/guarantee, and then you're stuck honoring it to all of your clients? Personally, I wouldn't offer any type of guarantee unless I have full control.

It's sad that a lot of hosts just say "uptime" guarantee as a marketing ploy, but when it comes to actually honour the guarantee, they make you run around the world for it. I see too many reviews on hosting companies not honouring their uptime guarantee.

If you're going to offer it, make sure you can actually follow through on the guarantee...

I have never offered an up time guarantee - for the simple reason, we can control every-ones Internet connection, firewall or ISP. If for some reason they cant reach the site, and say its down and its my responsibility to credit them... but the server was up just they had their own technical difficulties.

When I first started 4 years ago int he business, I saw this as a trend where people would complain just so they could get a credit or something for free. I wont guarantee anything I cant control.

uptime guarantees are just cliches put on any website nowadays

Maybe for you, although some hosts actually do have integrity and live up to their statements.