Does Your Host Do This?
You’ve got web hosting, great—but you have to ask yourself, what kind of hosting do you have? And is it the right kind of hosting?
Does your host provide a RAID1 shared hosting environment? Don’t know? Well, if they don’t, your just a hard drive failure away from being offline for up to 3-5 days, possibly longer, no kidding. The typical hard drive and OS repair at the leading data center, The Planet, takes up to 48 hours to complete, and then the work of restoring backups starts.
Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) protects against this needless downtime by providing data redundancy across two or more physical hard drives. In the event one drive goes bad, Crucial just removes the bad drive, replaces it with a new one, and your visitors are none the wiser.
Does your host provide backups for you and your site? Not sure? Hopefully you keep backups! Crucial keeps backups, even though we exclusively use RAID1 hard drive configurations for all our shared hosts. In fact, Crucial makes external disk backups of your SQL databases once an hour, 24 hours a day.
We make a daily backup of all your files and store them on a Network Area Storage (NAS), not the local machine where the backups are not accessible during a failure. We also make weekly backups that we store on NAS, and did I mention we back up all your data files and SQL for 30 days also on NAS? Don’t forget that these backups do not count against your disk space usage or your bandwidth usage at Crucial. Yeah, Crucial does that, does your host?
Does your host have a clone backup server ready to restore backups on to? Hard to tell, but you should probably err on the side of caution if they didn’t tell you they did! Crucial does! We have a clone on standby ready to take clients backups at an administrator’s beckon. Crucial doesn’t wait for anyone, and neither do our clients. Do you?
Does your host use second hand, recycled, last years garbage servers? Crucial doesn’t. In fact, show us another web hosting company that offers a quad 3 GHz processor, RAID1, 6GB of RAM, and dual network interfaces for their shared hosting products and we will give you a year’s free service and a 101 day money back guarantee. Yeah, we’re that sure.
We ain’t scared! Is your host scared? We post our server status and uptime publicly. Why shouldn’t we? It’s perfect, and we think you’ll be impressed. See our current shared hosting provisioning server for yourself. Can your host do that?
Does your host know when something’s wrong, or do you tell them? Crucial utilizes state of the art network operations and monitoring system known as Nagios. Nagios, combined with the well known Cacti systems and service graphing software, provides Crucial with a view of our servers that few others in this industry can claim.
Nagios is configured to monitor every public service—like SMTP, POP3, HTTP—on every hosting machine in the Crucial server farm, once every three minutes. If a problem is detected, Nagios is configured to run system utilities in response to the problem and to attempt to self repair and restart the downed service on the affected host. You can say our servers are “Self Healing”.
Nagios is also configured to escalate the checking to once a minute after a problem is discovered. If Nagios detects a service down for more than two minutes, notification is sent to the administrators on shift via email.
If Nagios determines that the service is still down for more than five minutes, a trouble ticket is automatically submitted to the Crucial Level Three Technical Administrators, which are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If after 30 minutes the service is still inoperable, Nagios is configured to begin paging off-shift supervisors every 30 minutes to provide immediate reaction and to start firing people. Crucial simply has the best damn self repairing and monitoring systems you can imagine. If there is a problem, you most likely will never know. Can you say that about your current host?
What about your support? Have you ever waited 24 hours for a response to a trouble ticket? Maybe 12 hours? Crucial thinks that is just crazy and has a 1 hour ticket response time guarantee. Most tickets are handled in 15 minutes or so, but you’ll never have to wait 2 hours, not even on Christmas.
Does your host use a premium data center to stage its services from? Crucial employs the SoftLayer data center for staging shared hosting and managed dedicated servers. Crucial fired The Planet because they were unable to keep up with our demands. We don’t take a data center for granted, and we proactively test our data center for performance and disaster recovery response times. Crucial understands that it is important to find these data center inadequacies before a catastrophic situation occurs.
The bottom line is that the Crucial client is a little bit different. A bit more educated, a bit more professional, and a bit more responsible for their business and online presence.
Ask yourself this question. Is your host crucial? It should be.
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I don’t care if you don’t post this, it’s more of a personal review describing why you didn’t get my “sale”.
Very nicely written…
Makes me want to give you a try. As you may be for real and not just selling.
But no way am I paying a $50 setup fee just to find out we don’t “mesh”, you look “picky” about your support tickets. Your FAQ is rather skimpy. If I need help I expect to get it, promptly, effectively and courtesily, regardless how small a matter it may be.
AND I CERTAINLY NEED SUPPORT!
And other smaller details which I couldn’t find out about because no one was available (even though live chat showed to be online, but didn’t answer)
Can’t get help with sales makes me wonder about getting support.
What with all the bad host on the net, it’s just foolish to gamble setup fees going from one to another till you finally find one worth the money. Not to mention the amount of time wasted seeking them, setting up and moving again, etc…
Thats just awful for both sides btu more so for the user thats out the money and work because of someone elses “lackings” … usually misrepresentations.
Other than that blog post I see no signs that you’ve been hosting long, under this domain.
Todays host seems very risky.
It is getting very hard to find a good one.
Would be refreshing to find a host that actually gives such implied value to their customers.
anyways, thats my 2 cents thats worth 0 (except for the lost sale)