Recently, we had a client who was having outage trouble with the ISP we recommended for them. They’d had four individual instances where their site was unreachable, in the span of about two months.
Hop Studios helped them investigate the causes, and also get an overall sense of why these site failures were happening. No one likes having an unavailable site, especially around critical times like a campaign launch or at the end of a promotional period. After the client understood the reasons behind each outage, they were a little calmer about it, though still, of course, justifiably anxious not to have it happen again.
So, I wanted to make sure you, our clients, know a bit about outages and what can be done about them.
Most basic ISPs offer 99.5% uptime, which means they might be down for up to 3.8 hours a month, for upgrades and service, as well as unscheduled outages.
This month the client I was talking about earlier actually was down for a little more than this amount, but it helps, I think, to keep in mind that when you pay $20 / month, you’re not getting the same level of uptime promise as is required at a credit card company or by an ATM—which, come to think of it, seems to always be down when I want to get money out…
If you ever have difficulties with your ISP, let us know. Report the outage to them right away, of course, so they can start fixing it, but we’ll follow up and help you understand what really happened.
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