Hostgator 99.9% Uptime Guarantee Review

In order to boost the confidence of subscribers, there are a few guarantees that Hostgator made. Being one of the few, 99.9% uptime guarantee is the most powerful guarantee a web host company can offer.

So how does it work?

Below is quoted from their Term of Service document:-

If your shared / reseller server has a physical downtime that is not within the 99.9% uptime you may receive one month of credit on your account. Approval of the credit is at the discretion of HostGator dependent upon justification provided. Third party monitoring service reports may not be used for justification due to a variety of factors including the monitor’s network capacity/transit availability. The uptime of the server is defined as the reported uptime from the operating system and the Apache Web Server which may differ from the uptime reported by other individual services. To request a credit, please contact sales@hostgator.com with justification. All requests must be made in writing via email. Uptime guarantees only apply to shared / reseller solutions. Dedicated servers are covered by a network guarantee in which the credit is prorated for the amount of time the server is down which is not related to our uptime guarantee.

So there are 2 key points there:-

1. Physical downtime – What is that suppose to mean?

   Here is an answer which I got from their technical support:

   “The physical downtime is the actual time the server is down not including a network outage.”

   It is clear enough that Hostgator only guarantee the uptime of their physical hosting server. I believe that only includes electricity outage and server’s software and hardware issue. For example the guarantee does not work as long as the server that hosts your website is up, regardless if your website is down or up to internet users (which may be caused by many reasons for example internet connections outage from an earthquake, improper setting in your website, etc).

2. Uptime report from third party monitoring is not valid.

   This sounds really tricky. Hostgator justifies their uptime by reviewing their uptime report themselves. Isn’t that a conflict of interest? Are they trying to manipulate the result? The good news is: Hostgator does perform by giving 99.9% uptime all this while even the uptime is tracked by third party software (Hostgator January – August 2009 Uptime Report).

My Opinion on 99.9% Uptime Guarantee

Well, I have to say the guarantee is very reasonable.

In order to have your website up and running, it involves many parties, from web hosting provider, ISP, international trunking to your local utility providers. Thus for Hostgator, common sensibly, the best they can do is only to guarantee the operation of their physical property (hosting servers) which they have direct control in.

For the monitoring software, that makes sense too (though it still sounds really tricky). Hostgator is a company and they should do thing with standard. They are currently hosting more than 2 millions of domains. What if 2 million users show 2 million different uptime reports to claim for credit? Which report should they accredit? Not mentioning about the possibility of conman making up fake report.

This 99.9% uptime guarantee is really an honest guarantee. It is clear and convincing enough without any decorative words trying to cover the truth.