Hello,
I'm new to the webmaster arena. I am currently with Hostway.
I realized last night that they see fit to take servers down(and my website along with it)
for at least an hour to perform "maintenance".
When I asked them why they don't have clustered failover servers so that my site stays up, they responded with, "We don't do that." I was happy with Hostway until this happened, but it's absolutely unacceptable to have my site down for that length of time.

Needless to say, I'm looking for a new host. I was just wondering if this is a common practice for webhosts to take servers down for maintenance without failover. Does anyone know of any webhosts that are better about downtime?

Also, I would like to find one with comparable services. I need ASP.NET support, a secure folder, and I really liked the Urchin Webstats thing. I think I'll miss that most of all.

Thanks for any responses
-Tom

Would be good to inform there customers first but if it was for emergency maintenance, they may have not been able to inform there customers

I would be worried if my webhost didn't occasionally have some maintenance windows. That doesn't necessarily mean your website should go down though. Since failover can easily double your costs I wouldn't expect any ultra cheap hosting packages to have great failover.

I agree with Duport though. You should have been informed of the maintenance, otherwsie it is downtime.


-Ginty

Use seghosting.com Its very good.

Originally Posted by NotalesS

Use seghosting.com Its very good.

A little on the wimpy side...OK, i guess. I just don't trust hosts too well if they advertise other sites on their own.

Hostway are a well reputed company - have been around for a very long time. You will find that most companies do not provide failover servers, unless you are using mission critical services.

did u check if they keep customers informed on their forums or via their own control panel about sever maintainence/downtime. i know ev1 does that - never got any emails from them - just kept an eye on the forums.

Thanks for the replies.
Hostway says that they posted the scheduled downtime on their SiteControl page, but I never saw it. Of course I don't go there every single day and when I do go there, I click what I need and tune the rest out. An email would've been nice. Aside from that, the downtime was at 10pm Pacific. Not exactly the middle of the night. Lots of people on this coast are still up surfing the web before bedtime. It's just unacceptable.

But that's all neither here nor there since I've switched to CI Host already. I was impressed with their claims and I got a pretty good deal on the hosting. So far, so good. Only time will tell.

-Tom