By keva on

What is reasonable downtime from a reputable VPS host?

My Drupal sites have been down now for of 30 hours, and I have not heard from support on over 8 hours.

The server my VPS is on had a raid array failure, and was down for 21 hours. The company (liquidweb) never contacted me. I found out 6 hours after the failure (I'd been in meetings) and when I contacted them, they knew about it and were working on it. When it came back up after 21 hours, they waited 2 hours to inform me. My contact email is on a different host, so that was never the problem.

Then I discovered none of the database connections on the server work so while email and non-Drupal sites are fine, all the Drupal sites are totally non-functional and only display the message "The site is currently not available due to technical problems".

LiquidWeb has apparently been "working on it" for 9 hours now, but not a word of update from them, despite 2 requests.

Is this reasonable? It seems totally unprofessional.

Comments

lhtown’s picture

lhtown commented

A few hours of downtime a year is to be expected from any host. Cheaper hosting can be expected to have more downtime since they don't maintain multiple locations, as many backup parts, have fewer employees, fewer contingency options and so forth. I am no expert, but it sounds to me like you have had enough downtime for an entire year even if you aren't paying much.

Regardless, it sounds like you aren't getting the reliability YOU want in which case it is time to go shopping and possibly (I don't know anything about your host and didn't look it up) pay more money.

That said, even the best of hosts can go through catastrophic events, but they shouldn't happen several times a year.

seanray’s picture

seanray commented

If there is a raid failure, it usually take quite long to recover. I am using midPhase VPS service, there is almost no downtime, but when they have a raid failure issue, my site is down for close 12 hours. But this only happened once during my 2 years hosting with them.

And one good thing from midphase that they have a blog to update their recovery status.