No host is perfect and even the best have a little downtime every now and then. So how often does 'your' host have downtime? How much more downtime would there have to be for you to consider switching hosts?

IMO, less than 1 hour downtime/month is acceptable.

If you are experiencing more than 1 hour downtime/week, you should consider switching hosting provider.

One hour equates to 99.86 % uptime. Many hosts publish an uptime of 99.99% which would be 4 minutes of down-time per month. As long as you don't consider updates to your server as down-time, then 99.99% is achievable. However, if you include all down-time, then 99.99% is going to be difficult to achieve. One reboot after an update will use up that 4 minutes. I would say 15 minutes of down-time, inclusive of maintenance, is more realistic. This would be 99.97% up-time,

From my expereince, most shared hosts guarantee 99.9% uptime but they do not give that much and never offer any money back if they cant. I do track 5 hosts every minute(using a thord party service) and on an avg. I have found they provide 98% to 99.5% uptime.

I haven't had any downtime yet . I would only change hosts when I start experiencing downtime ranging from 1 day and more.

I wouldnt mind even a whole day a month downtime as long as its consistent...say ONCE a month or even half a day twice a month.

But what we've been having the last month was the sites erratically going down literally all thru the day and night every day....EVERY day for weeks.

I had them move my site to another webserver and it was great for a while but the other day it was doing it again for about 2 days before I got hold of tech support and then a sales person and told them it that was it, fix it or I can give someone else my $200 a year.

So far its been top notch again, but for how long ?

They just made some sweeping hosting changes so now ALL of their hosting packages are unlimited space and bandwidth (NONE were just a couple weeks ago).
The only real advantage of this company is I get 16 dedicated IPs to use as I wish but frankly, if the server is down, whats the point ?

brianf, you make a good point there, many people when they see the 99% are just thinking thats in the entire company's time live. I wish more people would consider that when checking on hosting companies rather than just assume.

For me, I don't like downtime and I am really bad with the patience level. If I know its coming and its for maintenance thats one thing, but when I read people online about having not been able to access their site for over a 24hr period with no more than even a heads up I feel really bad for them.

I'm happy with ~99.9% uptime over prolonged periods of time. Go much lower than this, and I'm no longer happy.

I think I can tolerate short repeated downtimes better than one huge downtime.

I could go with a downtime of one day as long as I am not using my internet that time. But I could never achieve that. If ever the hosting company will have an update and a downtime is expected, I want them to tell me in advance so that I am not waiting on my site to appear.

If a downtime is frequent, say about 3 or 4 times a month with at least 12 hours each downtime, then I would consider switching to another company.

imaclient, while I understand what you're saying, I would be more concerned if my clients could access the sites, rather than myself.

We recently obtained a client, and engineering company in our local area, who was not able to access their website while inside their office.

The entire outside world was able to access it, just not any of their employees while in the office. Typically, when they went home, they were able to access their site just fine.

Now, as far as the site was concerned, they were fine with this, because as long as their customers/potential customers were able to access the site, then they considered it no problem.

However, we quickly pointed out to them that if they couldn't access the server from within the office, that also meant they could not get their email from customers/potential customers. Needless to say the mood changed a bit lol.

It took us about a week of reconfiguring their LAN in their office, a lot of hours per day in their office as well (we were there so much that we mght as well have been employees of their's lol), etc. We finally realized that they were connecting behind a proxy, and being that the server blocked access after certain number of simultaneous access attempts from the same proxy, it would allow their site and email to load once or twice, but as soon as more than a few of their employees tried to get email at the same time, boom...no more access. Once we figured that out, and moved their account to a second server without that limitation, everything was fine again.

While the story is a little off topic, the principle behind it is the basically that, until it came to email, the company's ability to access their own site was of very little importance to them. They just wanted to know that their customers could access it, which was the case.

Typically, I guess the best rule of thumb is when you're not able to access your own site, go into troubleshooting mode to make sure it's not something on your end, or YOUR network's end first, before considering it downtime from the host.

I think a lot of folks forget that the hosting industry works on a very simple principle that powers the internet completely...

1. The hosting company stores, presents, and delivers the data, which relies on their own connectivity, and network.

2. The viewer/customer/surfer retrieves the data, which relies on their own connectivity and network.

Process complete.

However, any broken links in those two steps causes number 2 not to happen, and the viewer/surfer tends to fall back on.."Well the host or website must be down." or in more general terms, referring to the list above, "Number1 is not happening"....When in fact, it could just be that number 2 is not happening.

Bleh....I'm rambling again lol. Hope I was able to make that understandable, and apologize for such a long post to get such a short point across.

I have only like 2 minutes at month... Becuase sometime i restart my dedicated server eheheh!

Good point ANMMark. There aren't too many that actually checkout their network/computer before making the assumption that it's the server. Of course, once someone has so many problems with accessing their site due to their provider I suppose it's just human nature.

I have some downtime with not critical with Hostgator.com's hosted web sites and I have had no downtime with HostWW.net (use them for quite short period of time).
But maybe some downtimes were lost, because I do not watch my web sites constantly

I have not had much problem with actual downtime, but there has been the occasional slowdown.

While it does not occur often enough to be a serious issue for me, it can still be rather annoying if it happens at the wrong time.

All in all though, I can't whine too much.