High Availability Hosting
Providing a fault free and reliable service on a consistent basis does not happen by chance. A lot of time, money and experience is required to manage the very complex systems involved and to keep them safe and protected from the numerous sources of ill intent that exist in today's internet community.
Host1 utilises full redundancy and automatic failover systems at every level, this includes our web, mail and SQL servers, as well as our network hardware. There is no single point of failure anywhere within our network. We also have at least 3 separate physical connections to the internet backbone, sourced from different suppliers.
Our servers are located at Global Switch, Australia's premier datacentre, providing the highest possible level of security, redundancy and reliability.
Litespeed WebServer
As important as having redundant hardware and networking is, it would be pointless if it ran unreliable software. The vast majority of websites on the internet are hosted on web servers running Apache, which is a free application.
At Host1, we use Litespeed, a commercial, enterprise grade web server which is specifically created for high performance hosting environments. Litespeed is fully compatible with Apache, so all your Perl, PHP, MySQL etc. scripts will run on it without any need for modification. More about Litespeed.
Uptime Guarantee
Host1 aims for a minimum uptime of 99.99% across all our web servers. We are so confident in our ability to deliver on this promise that we commit to paying significant penalties to our customers if we do not keep this promise.
Compare our table below to our competitors and you may be surprised how many fail to 'put their money where their mouth is'
| Website Availability | Penalty Credit (as % of monthly fees) |
|---|---|
| 99.99% or higher | - |
| 99.50% to 99.98% | 50% |
| 99.00% to 99.49% | 100% |
| less than 99.00% | 200% |
The uptime guarantee applies to all web services, i.e. http, https and MySQL and to network connectivity. In other words, we guarantee that our web servers will always be responsive and reachable by general internet users. The guarantee does NOT cover any email services and does NOT apply to scheduled maintenance periods.