Should Web Hosts Pay for Downtime?

Yesterday, American datacenter customers received a landmark £1 million settlement from their provider after experiencing up to several weeks of downtime. This leads to the question: should hosts be held accountable for downtime?

A good host will have an uptime of at least 99.5%. This translate to roughly 1.8 days of downtime per year. This is time that your website is unavailable to the world.

All hosts have outages. It’s just one of those things we have to deal with. If your web host is any good, most downtime will be the result of maintenance. It’s not uncommon, however, to hear about a host experiencing up to several consecutive days of downtime or instances of poor performance lasting weeks.

A few years ago, a large top-1o host I was using suffered massive downtime. Not only was it hit with a power outage, but poor planning on their part had resulted in heavy server overload. The host had taken on too many customers and did not expand fast enough. As a result, many customers reported abysmal performance. For a period of around three or four months, my site was either offline or too slow to use.

If I remember correctly, my account was credited for the downtime. The amount came out to be a few pounds. It is considered good practice for a host to credit you for downtime, but should they pay more?

The term “downtime” is overly generous to hosts. During system outages, not only is your site unavailable, but you lose traffic. Otherwise loyal visitors will stop visiting your site if it’s down for a significant period of time, and if you sell products or services, clients will run away in droves.

Perhaps my most memorable instance of downtime occurred at the worst possible time. An article written on a blog of mine made it to the frontpage of Digg.com, which normally brings in upwards of 100,000 visitors over the course of 24 hours. To my dismay, my host went down soon afterwards. The outage was not caused by the heavy traffic coming to my site, but because my provider decided to do some unannounced maintenance.

The outage lasted a few hours, all the while I lost tens of thousands of visitors and advertising revenue. This also cost me the possibility of these readers returning in the future and undoubtedly dozens of backlinks from other bloggers reading Digg.

So what could have been a defining moment for my site came to nothing- all thanks to my host. I contacted customer service about my displeasure, only to get a short apology and a reminder that a contract I agreed to clears them of any responsibility for downtime.

Such a policy is the norm for the hosting industry. Hosts might be generous enough to credit your account for hosting costs associated with an outage, but never damages. If they did, then their costs would likely skyrocket. We would probably see the cost of hosting double or triple.

What makes the American case where the customers received a huge settlement is the plaintiffs were not web hosting customers, but instead rented servers from a datacenter. In fact, many of these servers were owned by web hosts! So while big business gets a break when things break, the average consumer doesn’t.

Keep in mind part of the reason why the datacenter had to pay is because they were negligent. It is also easier for companies like web hosts with concrete business models to prove damages. Maybe things will change in the future, but for now average Joe is out of luck when web hosts go out. That’s why you should always make sure your provider is reliable before handing your site over.

Photo: Flickr