Uptime.com Blog
What You Need in a Website Service Contract
Website service contracts can be fairly straightforward, but each business needs to look for a few key things before signing on the dotted line.
The first, and perhaps most important, is an uptime guarantee. Some hosting providers will ensure that your website is up and running a certain percentage of the time. This is a great clause to have, but you should make sure that the number they quote is up to standard. While 99% uptime may sound great, over the course of the year that means a site will be down for more than three days.
That’s a lot of time. The industry standard is actually 99.99%. That gives the provider a little wiggle room for mistakes, but also makes sure the business does not suffer from large periods of downtime. Businesses should feel comfortable with 99.99% uptime with the provider paying damages if the site does not reach those numbers.
Room for Growth
The great thing about web hosting providers is that they should allow businesses room to grow. Websites can only handle a certain amount of traffic at a given time. For many sites, this is not a problem as they may get a consistent amount of traffic from day to day that allows them to make long-term plans.
Sometimes, though, things change. Perhaps a business gets extra attention from a media roundup or grabs attention from a viral marketing campaign and traffic increases. Without proper backup, the site may not be able to handle this extra traffic and may crash. As such, website owners should get in their contract an ability to purchase extra capacity as needed for the same, or at least close to it, in price.
Web hosting providers can typically provide this capacity with ease, but if they cannot, than businesses may want to find another company with which to work. Getting stuck with a host that cannot adequately meet this demand is a big problem. With these two considerations, companies should be sure they are getting the core services they need from web hosting providers.
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