Support – Hosting

If you’re looking for an ISP, the quality of their support is the most important thing.  If the support isn’t up to it, then you really should be somewhere else!

So many ISPs make promises that they are very unlikely to be able to keep.  Many say that they are provide x% uptime.  What they mean is that they will do their utmost to achieve that uptime.  We have no doubt that they will try, but there are always factors outside their control that are going to cause problems.  The only way to minimise the effects of these problems is by duplicating everything: hardware, power supplies, data centres, cabling, software, internet connections, storage, etc., not to mention using diverse routing of data streams.  All of this costs a great deal of money and so only becomes affordable in large data centres which provide the right economies of scale.

Most of us will never have given a moment’s thought to:

• On-site power infrastructure
• Fibre backbone routes and their proximity to the data centre
• Type of fibre in proximity
• Carrier presence
• Carrier type

but the sad truth is that we should!  For some it will come as a surprise that data centre planners assess the probability of a jumbo jet hitting a data centre and knocking it out, and ‘bouncing’ in such a way as to take out a second data centre that is comparatively close by.  OK – the risk of any of these things actually having a bearing on your hosting in the UK is small, but they will hopefully make you think about the vast number of potential threats to your website hosting!  We think about all this so you don’t have to!

Uptime

It’s also worth thinking a little about uptime. We prefer to think of downtime rather than uptime – after all, if your site is ‘up’ you’re happy! The only time you’re unhappy is when it’s ‘down’! So, we think we should all be concerned about how much time a site is likely to be down when a provider tells you that they are guaranteeing x% uptime. We think this table says it all…

[table id=3 /]

So, even if someone is guaranteeing 99.9% uptime, which sounds pretty good on the face of it, what they mean is that your site could be down for as much as just under 9 hours in a year and they would still be meeting the terms of their guarantee.

In Practical Terms…

So, given all that we have said above, we promise that we will give you the best support we possibly can, 24 x 7 x 365 and always with the best members of staff.  You won’t go into a telephone ‘black hole’.  You won’t be fobbed off or stalled by someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.  In short, we’ll do our utmost to provide you with the best support you can get.  We’re small enough to care but big enough to cope, and we mean it!

At Net2Air, we really do understand how important good support is when you’re web hosting. That’s why we have a comprehensive support section on our website. We hope that we’ve done our job right and you will be able to find answers for every possible support question.