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Uptime and Downtime is one of the key issues that many website owners face. If you’re thinking to setup a mission critical website or an e-commerce site then uptime and downtime is the thing you should consider while looking for a web host. You may have heard about it lot of time, but those who haven’t, this article will explain you the exact meaning and importance of uptime and downtime in web hosting.

Definition of Uptime and Downtime

What is Uptime?

Uptime, put simply in the context of web hosting, is the time during which your site is fully operational (viewable and usable).

What is Downtime?

Downtime, conversely, is used to refer to the duration of time when a system is unavailable. These figures are usually given in percentages.

For e-commerce sites uptime and downtime is highly relevant because downtime could translate to lost revenues, and in this highly competitive world, it could very well mean your business’ survival.

Hence, it is important that you choose a web host that has a high uptime guarantee (the higher, the better). An uptime guarantee of 99.5 – 99.99% is realistic and considered to be very good in most cases.

Tips to make sure that the host you choose offers the finest deal:

• Research your (potential) host’s uptime record and READ the fine print of their uptime guarantee (if they have, which you find in their Service Level Agreements).
• Ask about your host (-to-be)’s disaster plans, redundancy and backups.
• Re-check and make sure you get an uptime guarantee before signing and how reliable they are when it comes to refunding for and crediting downtimes.

Once you’ve found your host, it is necessary that you also monitor your site’s uptimes and downtimes to ensure you get what you pay for and also to see if they’re living up to their promise (so you can change hosts if they aren’t).

Quick Tips:

• Finding 100% (or 99.99%) uptime is not easy nor is it cheap
• Focus on quality of service and not on quantity. Don’t just look for hosts that offer you a refund for downtimes, instead, look for ones that actually live up to their ‘uptime guarantee’
• Look for providers with good hardware (as it goes to redundancy)
• SLA’s and ‘uptime guarantees’ could just be marketing trick
• Third party uptime measures are valuable resources
• Forums, although good sources of information, may not necessarily be ‘accurate,’ particularly when it comes to host recommendations
• To prevent downtimes, find providers that offer hosting on two separate machines and whose servers have automatic switchable mechanisms

Posted under Webhosting

Windows and Linux are the two operating systems mostly used for hosting web servers. While each has its advantages, the so called LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) combination is preferred for new installations that don’t have to worry about integration with existing or legacy systems.

Why is Linux hosting always a preferred alternative?

The advantages that Linux hosting offers in combination with other open source software like PHP and MySQL partly accounts for its popularity. Linux itself is open source and Linux hosting offers all the advantages associated with open source software. Open source software allows constant improvements to be made by any person who is interested to do so. This automatically adds a large number of people who work on problems to make the software better.

It is also likely that these programmers work on problems that they have faced and are therefore coming out with relevant solutions. The fixation of problems and bugs is also faster in open source software, being a continuous process.

One of the biggest advantages is that you can post any problem that you face and somebody might come up with a solution. You can even engage your own programmer to do this. Another advantage of open source software is that you are not tied to any particular vendor. All these advantages are automatically passed on to Linux hosting.

Being open source is not the only advantage that Linux and Linux hosting offer. Linux hosting supports more cross platform applications, and offers a higher portability than most proprietary operating systems. Linux runs on a variety of hardware platforms, which means that you have the freedom to select the hardware or even migrate to a different hardware later without any hassles.

Linux hosting is more stable since Linux is an extremely stable operating system. Some of the other popular operating systems slow down after running for a while, necessitating a reboot after comparatively long periods of running, to ensure performance.

Linux can go on for months at a time without any problems such as memory leaks that plague other systems. Apart from this Linux provides a number of system-based safeguards, including better security, safety against attacks, and recovery procedures, these make Linux hosting a robust and secure alternative.

Linux can communicate with most other systems without any problem. Interoperability and communication are two important requirements in today’s computers, both of which are met by Linux. There are a number of third party tools that have been made available under Linux over the years, enabling you to perform many common tasks with ease. Linux hosting can offer these advantages to you in turn.

Linux hosting is cost effective. Theoretically, Linux is available free of cost. However, you pay for many commercial versions that you can use on your computer. Since there is no cost to the commercial provider on account of the effort put in for original development that the seller has to recover, this cost is lower than comparable costs for other operating systems.

Moreover, unlike other operating systems, you generally don’t pay for multiple installations of the same software. This means that even if you pay the same amount for the original copy of the software, you don’t incur additional cost for a number of installations, bringing the real cost further down. The cost advantage does not end there. Because of its stability and the availability of a range of tools, the ongoing cost of operation of Linux Hosting is quite low.

The performance of Linux systems is quite good and you can get good speeds even with some of the older computers under Linux. Linux has the capability to handle a large number of simultaneous users.

This makes Linux hosting an ideal choice for servers, particularly web servers, where the traffic may be large with a large number of users simultaneously accessing the server. The ability of Linux to run without deterioration over long periods of time, handling a large number of customers with a high level of performance becomes a great advantage for web servers.

One of the major advantages of Linux is that it was originally developed over the Internet and hence is automatically suited for working in a networked environment both as a client and as a server. This makes Linux hosting an ideal choice for network-based applications such as the Internet.

If you are wondering what all this has got to do with you, if you are using a shared web hosting service, the answer is simple. In a competitive world, the advantages that the provider of the Linux hosting service enjoys are automatically passed on to you.

Posted under Linux Hosting