I learned a invaluable lesson yesterday, this is something that most people COMPLETELY overlook.
I had 8 HOURS OF DOWNTIME overnight. 
No, this was NOT shared hosting, it was a dedicated Mediatemple Nitro $750/month supped up box.
They’re response to the downtime : “Sorry for the inconvenience”!?!
Needless to say, I immediately switched over to another web hosting company that I’ve been using for years.
What really makes me SICK to my stomach is all the potential sales I lost with Mediatemple due to smaller, intermittent downtime. Which I’m sure happened frequently-might explain some of those mysterious sales gaps I’ve been seeing.
What’s worse is that my business partner had to get the server up and running again, mediatemple did NOTHING. And they didn’t even notify me that my server was down.
“So Amit, what are you going to do to prevent this in the future?”
It’s all about having the right systems in place.
Well, here’s Rule #1: Do NOT trust ANY web hosting company, EVER.
Rule #2 : Constantly monitor you’re uptime, using a service such as Pingdom.
Rule #3: Use an enterprise DNS service that allows you to setup a DNS Failover. In other words you can setup your domain to automatically point to a different server if your main server goes down. I recommend using 2 DIFFERENT web hosting companies for this setup.
First things, first: setup a monitoring service such as Pingdom and see if your web host is screwing you over!
Amit,
I would like to know more on Rule #2.
I have dedicated servers for some of my sites but this failsafe method sounds good. How are you planning to implement this?
I know all about down time and how much it blows – don’t get me started…
Sorry, Amit…once bitten twice shy…thanks for sharing it’ll make some of us have backup plans for EVERYTHING! Don’t they get to compensate you for the loss? They should include a clause to cover that in their terms of service relative to their uptime average…
I had similar problems. I finally paid SiteUptime $48/yr to monitor my VPS and Hostgator shared hosting every 5 minutes. I get instantly notified via email or SMS. FYI, the hostgator shared hosting has 100% uptime so far. The VPS is doing worse! Insanity but a necessity for any site generating $$.
Hey Amit, welcome back.
~ Corey Bornmann
HostTracker.com – is the best service for monitoring website’s uptime. Try it
Rule #1 is the word.
A friend has a booming online software business, and recently reported that he’d suffered a 48 hour server shutdown.
I was shocked to learn that he doesn’t at least check his site and Analytics first thing every morning. Sales stopped and he didn’t investigate until 2 days had passed.
Rule #2 is great if you suspect outtages.
Thanks for the heads up on Pingdom! Just signed up for a free account. I just made a post about a bad experience I had with a host as well (FusedHosting.net). Check it out here if you’d like – http://www.jiglet.net/846/proxy-hosting-review-fused-hosting-fusedhosting-net/
If you have more than one server, I recommend setting up something like Nagios on Rackspace to monitor your own servers. It’s more technical, but also more flexible.
That is nuts that a dedicated server would be down like that. I got sick of the bad customer support at Hostgator and left. But that was a shared/reseller environment.