Hosting uptime 99.9% – sounds good? Certainly in theory a 99.9% uptime guarantee means you should expect no more than about 9 hours a year downtime (or about three quarters of an hour in a month). Unfortunately the picture is more complicated. Firstly it’s clear that no-one can offer a cast-iron guarantee that their service will be available - there will always be potential circumstances beyond their control. In reality the guarantee can at best mean financial compensation, and even then it is highly unlikely that compensation will be proportionate to the loss to your business.
When I asked a number of hosting providers about their guarantees they were very cagey, and usually referred to their 30 day money back guarantees or similar. Not a lot of use of course if you get a problem six months into a hosting contract. Even if they do offer compensation it is likely to be limited to a proportionate amount of the hosting cost, so if the service cost you £60 for a year the service could be down for a whole month and you may only be entitled to £5 back. At best from a generous hosting company they may give you a full refund if they fail to meet their target (but does that mean they will carry on hosting the site for the remainder of the contract?). Of course this is at the basic end of the market where price competition is high. In the same way as Ryanair contests about compensation for air travellers when flights are cancelled, it may be unreasonable to expect large amounts of compensation for a service that only costs £5 a month.
Uptime means your website is available, yes? Well maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. Some uptime guarantees are related to the hosting services network to the outside world rather than individual/shared web servers. Or the guarantee may be averaged across all their servers so if you happen to be hit hard you can only take comfort that others will have fared better.
As with most things in life you tend to get what you pay for, and higher rated uptime guarantees (e.g. 99.99%) are likely to cost you more for the hosting. Once hosting costs get into the hundreds of pounds a year range, it is worth tying down exactly what is meant by the guarantees and what happens if they are not met. A few questions to ask:
- Is there planned downtime for the servers (maintenance time), if so how much is this, when does it happen, and is that included in the uptime guarantee?
- Does the hosting company automatically compensate you if they fail to meet the guarantee, or do you have to notice and report the problem (the latter seems to be more prevalent)?
- If a guarantee is not met, what actions will be taken to reduce/minimise the chance of future occurrences. For example will planned maintence time be reduced (and what are the potential risks of that)?
- Is there a cap on the amount of compensation that will be paid if a guarantee is not met?
- If a full refund is the compensation, will the hosting contract be terminated?
Perhaps the answer is some kind of insurance scheme that offers more flexibility in compensation. After all, a brochure website may be important to your business but is unlikely to lose as much money as a highly active e-commerce site, and yet the hosting costs/uptime guarantees could well be identical.
Share your views/experiences in the comments. I would love to hear of both negative and positive experiences with hosting companies, and also any suggestions you have for reducing the worry of this aspect of running a business.
Why WCAG 2.0 Encourages Use of Images to Replace Text
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0
At level AA of WCAG 2.0 it has become much easier than WCAG 1.0 to justify the use of images instead of text (at level AAA they are prohibited though). The following is quoted from the WCAG 2.0 Quick Reference :
It sounds like there are only a few exceptional circumstances where images of text are allowed, sensibly including logotypes. Actually, the guidelines do become very liberal here though and the word essential can mean almost anything you like, including circumstances where a font the developer wants to use isn’t available. Whilst that is good from a freedom of design expression point of view, it does mean that anything outside the dozen or so fonts that are generally available on most operating systems is allowed to be used by replacing text with an image of text. It could be justified because the developer doesn’t have permission to use the font other than within images (perhaps an antisocial behaviour order (ASBO in the UK) prevents them!). Then to top it all, a developer can use text within an image if they aren’t sure that browsers will antialias the font correctly.
Difficulties in Accessibility Testing
In terms of accessibility testing, the only time I can fail a page against this checkpoint is if I can be reasonably sure that an image contains text using a standard widely available system font (very difficult to prove objectively).
The checkpoint seems to have become so watered down (possibly as a result of the length og time it took for WCAG 2.0 to be agreed) that it doesn’t seem worth having it at all (not at level AA anyway).
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