Are you monitoring the web host company that’s hosting your site? Do you know how often your site is down? When your site is down, it means potential visitors that could convert to sales or newsletter signups, cannot access your site. Previously, we wrote a guide on how to monitor your web host’s uptime. We’ve also made a promise that from the first week of December 2014, we will monitor a number of South African web hosting companies to see if they keep their promise of 99.99% uptime guarantee.
We are currently monitoring 8 web hosting services in South Africa. We’d love to grow this list, so if you represent a hosting company and would like to give us permission to monitor a website on your host. You can contact us and we can arrange to host a site on one of your packages to test its uptime.
Here are the companies we are currently monitoring:
As we have mentioned on our opening blog post, a web host’s reliability is what determines a good hosting company. Even though they are not any less important, support and package features come after. Hence in this series, we’ll be monitoring the following factors on each hosting service:
- Monthly Uptime percentage
- Longest downtime
- Longest run (uptime) without interruption
- Total number of downtimes
The factors that we will be monitoring will give you a clear picture of who not to talk to when you need to host your website. Even though they will not answer all the questions you have, you’ll at least get some guidance. Also, the statistics will make even more sense after 3 months of running these tests.
It should be noted though, not all downtimes are due to overwhelmed server and outdated hardware. Some downtimes are planned, for an example, to update the server so it can be protected from the latest viruses and other malicious attacks. Unfortunately, we will not track whether a certain downtime was caused by a scheduled maintenance or server upgrade. The least we can do is mention it here if we received an email notification (about the planned maintenance) from the web hosting company.
With that said, make sure to check back on this page often to see if we have published our latest findings. You will find a link to our latest findings on top of the list below.
Here’s a sneak peak of the current standings (click link below for more info):
| Hosting Provider | November 2014 | December 2014 | January 2015 | Average 3 Months Uptime |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cybersmart | 99.91% | tba | ||
| Frikkadel | 99.88% | tba | ||
| Elitehost | 99.83% | tba | ||
| Hostking (Reseller) | 99.8% | tba | ||
| Gridhost | 99.79% | tba | ||
| MI HOST | 99.76% | tba | ||
| Webspacebar | 99.72% | tba | ||
| Hostking | 99.70% | tba |