Sometimes bad things happen to servers. The more you host on a web server, the more potential problems you run into. Sometimes rebooting is needed. And if you run a hosting business and you have a call, IM, email and text messages coming in at the rate of 1 per 15 seconds, this could be quite stressful. Sometimes a reboot will save the day. But during reboot, and you get a customer complaining every 15 seconds, how many customers will get mad during your downtime?
I decided to time my actual reboot. I was running on one of my servers this setup:
- Intel Pentium 4, 2.4GHz with 512KB cache.
- 2GB Memory
- 80GB UDMA Hard Disk
- LAMP setup running cPanel
And I decided to ping my services and check each one every 30 seconds as the server reboots.
- 2 minutes - Server is up but Apache is down.
- 2 minutes 30 seconds - Apache is up. MySQL is still down.
- 5 minutes - MySQL is up.
So clients with static websites should be happy already after in less than 3 minutes. Websites dependent on MySQL will have to wait 5 minutes in the reboot. And with the rising popularity of CMS packages like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and forums like phpBB, IPB, SMF and vBulletin and all other dynamic websites may get them irritated and forced to call you. The more clients you have, the more possible irritated client call you may get. Assuming you get a client complaining every 15 seconds, in the 5 minute downtime, you will have about 1,200 complains.
Does this happen in reality? Well I really don’t know. I current have about 400+ clients and during reboot, although I get a client complaining every 15 seconds via text, phone, SMS and email, they are usually just from 3 to 5 clients complaining and following up every 15 seconds.
Additional note: Most of the time I say I have 99% uptime, as do many hosting companies do. If they ask why you were down and you said you have 99% uptime, how do you defend that? I believe 99% uptime can always be viewed monthly of even annually. If you do the math, even with 3 whole days down within a year, and the rest of the year the server was up. You still get 99% uptime. But of course you would never want that to happen. And it is nice to spread your downtime to a few minutes scattered all throughout the year. S**t happens, even big companies get downtime, and it will all boil down to customer support, damage control and value added services that keep them stay. If you have larger amounts of capital for expansion, better back up systems will keep people happier and stay.
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