Are UNIX Web servers really this reliable?

[iBook]

Found a company offering

1 gb storage
100 gb monthly bandwidth
blah blah blah
99.99% uptime

$8/month (annual prepaid)
$9/month otherwise
no setup fee

Is UNIX that bullet-proof that < $10 a month will get you 99.99% uptime? Seems too good to be true for "four 9s."

Thoughts?

Is it "spamming" for me to include the URL?

If it is, I will remove it immediately.

Thanks.

 

[Doctor Q]

Posting the details is fine.

Unix systems do have extremely good uptime. It usually depends on the availability of backup power during a power failure, since a mature Unix O.S. like Solaris can stay up months or years without crashing.

Do you really care about the difference between 99%, 99.9%, and 99.99% uptime, or do you just want to know if they are stretching their claims?

 

[iBook]

Mostly want to be sure the claim is accurate because ....

There are 8,766 hours in a year

99% uptime = 8,678
99.5% uptime = 8,722
99.9% uptime = 8,757
99.99% uptime = 8,765

The difference between 99.99% and 99% is 87 hours - almost 4 days!

Does 99.99% seem reasonable (i.e. "honest") for the price? I'm paying $20 right now with another company for half the storage (though with unlimited bandwidth, I think).

 

[Doctor Q]

When the fine print says guaranteed uptime, I wonder what happens if they are down for, say, 2 days in a year. If it's like other companies, you can probably get a refund for those 2 days, but only if you know what days/times the service was unavailable and phone them about it.

However, you can probably get that refund no matter what their guarantee is, so the guarantee may not mean anything in a practical sense.

 

[gbojim]

Yes it can be that bulletproof. Of the many UNIX and Linux servers supported by my company, there are 6 that have been up for over 2 years (they are all database servers and yes that means the OS rev is over 2 years old). The longest uptime for all of them is 2 yr, 8 mo, 13 days.

 

[Westside guy]

The Webserver I've been running (my real life job) for the past four years is running on Red Hat Linux. The only times the server has been down, however briefly, fall into three categories:

1) Reboots required by kernel patches/upgrades (so these are perhaps five minute downtimes)

2) Hardware failure (we had a disk failure a couple years ago)

3) Misconfiguration of the httpd.conf file by yours truly (usually typos)

 

[Jeewhizz]

you can have that sort of reliability, but it all depends on their network, power, connections etc etc - where's the DC... that will help you find out lots of stuff in case the preverbial brown stuff hits the fan.

I think 99.99% is a bit hard to promise, esp when you have upgrades that need to be done and so on, but its possible

Jee

 

[hmmfe]

Is UNIX that bullet-proof that < $10 a month will get you 99.99% uptime? Seems too good to be true for "four 9s."

Thoughts?

You can easily get 99.999% uptime with load-balancers,etc.

That being said, this is not a guarantee, but a warrantee. So, they balance the benefit of the claim against what they have to return if you bother to call them on it (most people don't).

Bottom line. You can get "5 nines" application reliability from Windows. It is all a matter of how you design the system.

 

[gekko513]

There seem to be some server standards:
99 Conventional 3-5 days
99.9 Highly Available 8.5 hours
99.99 Fault Resilient 1 hour
99.999 Fault Tolerant 5 minutes
These are from a Sun page.

The five 9's seem to be the ultimate goal. I found some other slightly different terms, too, but they were similar.

Sun guarantees 99.975 percent on their clustered Sun Enterprise 10000 systems. That is quite astonishing because I think Sun risks a lot more than a hosting service by guaranteeing this.

 

[jalagl]

Yes, UNIX servers are pretty reliable. It is funny that I saw this thread talking about it today, since last week I got a call from my last job to see if I remebered the password for root on a FreeBSD box I had setup there. They are moving to a new building, and need to shut down the machine to move it to its new place. The funny thing is that I left that company in January last year, so it's being running perfectly for the past 16 months!!