Dependability Of Service

[biff]

Greetings,

I am thinking of moving two sites currently being hosted somewhere else. I've been pleased with the service of my one site currently hosted by TCH.

 

The two sites I want to move are clients of mine and I have another client whose site will be ready soon.

 

I've been having trouble with the current host with the sites being accessible via http and ftp. The problems are causing downtime and stress.

 

I'd like to know if you can give me any stats on the uptime of your servers. Are there any long gaps of downtime for maintenance, failures, etc. I need to have some kind of info to give the clients before I move their sites.

 

Thanks a mil,

biff

[TCH-Andy]

Hi Biff,

 

Uptime depends slighly on the individual server of course, but overall the average for all servers is approx. 99.9% availability.

 

Maintenance time is not long downtimes - typically only a few mins.

 

A complete hard disk failure is the failure which typically causes the longest downtime. From memory the last time this happened it caused about 8 hours downtime for some sites (most sites were a lot less, as they were restored individually). Of course the probability of a hard disk failure on a particular server is low.

[biff]

Thanks Andy,

 

Sounds good.

 

Since I never moved a site from one host to another, can you tell me about the delay between the move. How long will it take to propogate, in other words, how much downtime will there be?

 

Thanks,

biff

[TCH-Bruce]

Full propagation will take between 24 and 72 hours. During that time some folks will see the old site while others will see the new site. And this can flip-flop back and forth until the propagation is complete.

[biff]

How will this affect robots (spiders) and search engine rank?

 

Will I get behind in the search engines?

 

Many Thanks,

biff

[Deverill]

If the old and new sites are identical then there will be no effect on the search engine spiders or rank. The search engine spiders will know they are at whatever your domain name is but they won't know which one they are hitting, whether it is the old location or the new.

[biff]

Thanks Jim, Two more questions.

 

If I pay for one of the options other than the minimum, can I get more reliabilty as far as uptime or is one option as reliable as the rest?

 

Also, I want to be sure I'm not in IP blocks that have I AM A SPAMMER, gambling, etc. Is that possible?

 

Many Thanks,

biff

[TCH-Bruce]

There is no difference in reliability between servers. They are all rock solid.

 

I would expect that you are concerned with bandwidth issues with adult and gambling sites. All servers are watched to be sure there are no resource hogs so that should be a non-issue.

[biff]

In addition to bandwidth hogs, I'm also concerned about search engines booting a site from their indexes.

 

I've heard that some search engines will kick out or ignore sites that share the same c block with sites like I AM A SPAMMER and gambling. So, I waqnt to stay far away from that kind of stuff.

 

Thanks,

biff

[TCH-Dick]

That is purely myth and I have never personally seen this happen. The vast majority of websites are hosted on shared IPs and they have no problem getting indexed.

I am assuming that this type of belief comes from the fact that I AM A SPAMMER sites have been known to get IPs banned for spamming. This would have no effect on the search engines. Honestly, search Google or any other search engine for an adult subject and look at the number of results. It doesn't appear that they are being banned.

 

And because I know your going to ask

We have a NO SPAM policy and work very hard to keep our servers from being listed. Matter of fact SPAM is the fastest way to get your account terminated.

Anyway as I step off my soap box...

I assure you that your site will be in very capable hands with us. Please let us know if you have any furhter questions.

[biff]

Thanks Dick and everyone,

 

I guess that sums it up for my questions. If we make the move, I see no problems with TCH. I've had none in the past 9 months here. As a matter of fact, I think TCH is great. That's why I want my clients to move their sites.

 

Thanks again,

biff