I posted this in the General Support forum, but then realized it's more of a pre-sales post.

I've had a personal website with Hostony for a couple months and am generally pretty happy. I have the Shared "Profi" plan. The features are excellent, the administration tools are excellent and Hostony's responsiveness to issues has been excellent. Uptime has not been so excellent.

I am now consulting for a small business (actually not so small-- they have multi-million dollar contracts even though they only have ten fulltime people). I set them up with an ISP that's supposed to be more "professional grade" than a place like Hostony, but I've been quite disappointed in this ISP's services. Their plan features are on a par with Hostony's, but their admin interfaces are crap compared to Hostony's and their staff has a much higher percentage of clueless people. On the other hand, uptime for their shared hosting has been significantly better than Hostony's since April and their network speed is a bit better, as judged by traceroutes and comparison of large FTP uploads/downloads.

I am considering moving my client to a Virtual Dedicated plan. So what I need is some feedback about the uptime reliability of Hostony's Virtual Dedicated "VPSSTART" servers. What has your experience been? To advise this company to move to Hostony I would need to be assured that VPSSTART uptime is *much* better than Hostony's shared hosting servers. Is that the case?

Oh, and does Hostony guarantee 99.99% uptime for Virtual Dedicated users, unlike the 99.00% guarantee for shared hosting?

Thanks,
Brikface

Apparently uptime on virtual server is higher than on shared server because much less peoples and sites have influence on it. I guess you will have guaranted 99,9% and possible 100% uptime. Some our virtual and dedicated servers were not rebooted or inaccessible for months. But your site software and caused server load can lower this uptime. There is only one reason about uptime when you say about virtual and dedicated server - network issues and outages because the other stuff is your sites problems.

Thanks for the response Alec. It's great to hear about these virtual accounts that have suffered no downtime for months... I can't quite agree with your statement that most downtime on shared accounts is caused by whacky stuff happening on users' sites, because how would you explain the better uptime for the shared hosting sites of this other ISP I mentioned? Are their shared users less whacky?... But anyway, I'm just about sold on your VPS for my client. Gonna think about it a little more over the weekend .

Thx,
Brikface

That *sounds* good, but why do you have to guess at it? Can you tell me for sure, or could Serge possibly respond to my original post?

Thx,
Brikface

Ok, I tell you: that will be sure