RealMetrics Web Hosting Metrics
I’ve been watching RealMetrics for a while and want to tell you what I’ve learned so far about this hosting metrics service. If you’re into scrutinizing web hosts like us or have done hosting research to find a home for your blog, you will have at some point read the uptime claims which are almost always reported by hosts in my experience as 99% or higher. Uptime is important for any prospective hosting customer for obvious reasons and may be dealt with in the service level agreement (SLA) of web hosts that want to set customer expectations and cover themselves if something goes wrong. Given Douglas Adams’ statement that “a day without sunshine is like night,” then a day without uptime would be a very dark night for both customer and host.
One way that web hosts instill confidence in their uptime performance is through server monitoring services like that offered by Alertra. These services are designed to detect and notify the host and customers about outages. Alertra provides a server status (okay, warning, critical) for things like ping, MySQL, http, dns, cpanel, etc.
RealMetrics seems to go beyond monitoring and tries to show you performance of each web host over time. The service ranks and graphs uptime, speed and technical support of web hosting companies by establishing actual accounts and running tests. It’s currently broken down by the categories shared, VPS, email and dedicated hosting. I won’t venture into the details of the methodology here, but it appears that RealMetrics is making a sincere attempt to discover and organize objective data about the hosts they monitor. I noticed that they are using multiple locations and time intervals in their measurements. The results are displayed in graphs so you can spot trends.
RealMetrics Support Response Time Callout
RealMetrics HostGator Support Response Time Summary Graph 1/15/07
RealMetrics HostGator Support Response Time Historical Trend Graph 1/15/07
Sometimes the results are not what you would expect. Some hosts rank higher than you would expect for certain metrics. Conversely, some of the hosts you thought were great performers, may not stand up to your impressions. A RealMetrics November 2006 Support Response Time report (also see the digg story) identified VPS Hosting support as twice as fast as shared hosting support. A RealMetrics Blog post outlines how with “over 37% of the ‘hosting months’ tested, the performance did not meet the typical 99.9% uptime per month Service Level Agreement.
Of course, there are going to be questions about anyone making claims of objective web host provider monitoring. Can this objective data be skewed? It is certainly possible. What if the web host being monitored able to discern which account is the one monitored by RealMetrics? If so, the host could try and improve their performance by directing outstanding customer support to that account, you know, sort of like Mr. Drysdale was always there for the Clampetts a la “The Beverly Hillbillies.”
We’ll see how this next generation of web hosting metrics develops.
February 1st, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Great review on web hosting metrics!!!!