In a parody of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, an American TV show where families in need receive free home renovations, a few happy-go-lucky folks from Microsoft redesign an outdated server room.

Though the Pentium 200 chips mentioned in the video are definitely outdated, I’m one of those people who likes to use equipment until it dies. Any decent web host will keep its servers up-to-date for performance and power efficiency reasons, however. If your host is still running old hardware, maybe you should send the Extreme Makeover guys in.

No details about the server datacenter itself have emerged, but news of the plan has trickled out through state officials, who have been negotiating tax breaks with the Cupertino-based company.

The server farm will employ 100 people in a region hit hard by the economic downturn.

For years Apple has offered web hosting to iLife users through MobileMe. It is mainly meant for small personal sites, though, and isn’t as feature-filled as a typical web host. It is unlikely Apple will try to compete with web hosts any time soon, so it’s more likely that the servers will be used for applications with Internet capability or perhaps iTunes.

Source: Apple Insider

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

NaviSite had told its customers to expect downtime for a server upgrade. Instead of upgrading the servers, however, they were unplugged when the company attempted to move them to a new location.

Nearly 200,000 websites suffered slow performance or were completely unavailable for as little as a few days to several weeks. The customers received four times their monthly bill in the settlement. The largest amount won by any one customer was £6,446 ($10,000 USD).

For ecommerce sites that lost customers, however, the equivalent of a few month’s free hosting won’t make up for the lost business. Some companies report losing as many as half their clients because of the outage.

The lead lawyer in the case, Stuart A. Davidson, made this comment:

Things just went completely awry. It may not be that big of a deal for maybe a book club … but for companies that actually sell, like e-commerce companies, being down for one hour, much less a day or weeks or more….

Source: Maryland Daily Record