This is what DH really needs

Hello everyone,

Recently there has been way too much discussion about how to improve DH's reputation (there's even an entry in DH's official blog). I think if they did something like this:

http://1and1.com (i.e. 99.99% uptime guaranteed)

it would be a great step towards attaining such rep. I used to host my sites with 1 & 1 and I personally DO NOT like them. The shell account they give (1 per account) is pretty much useless and the chroot jail is way too confining. Their phone service used to stink up the place, etc. I came to DH (I'm currently a customer) and I saw the great potential this service had...then...the great black out, brown out and completely out episodes happened. Ok, those were really tough months for me as all my customers were royally pissed (and rightfully so) because their sites were offline. So I decided to build a pool of customers and moved them to a truly dedicated hosting environment with uptime guarantees. It's awfully expensive and those people won't move a finger without charging my credit card first...so I'm looking to move out of that dedicated host to something that is more accesible, cheaper yet with good reliability. I would love to host those customers with DH again, but unless they offer some sort of guarantee, none of my customers will allow me to move their sites back...anyway, I digress. The main point is that if DH wants my customers biz back, they must advertise some sort of guarantee.

It's a good idea in theory, but I'll bet you OneAndOne.com doesn't report a majority of there service outages either. Even if there was a guarantee, all that'd do is give the winers something else to beat DH over the head with if their web server reboots. If you want a 99% guarantee, I know of a really good uptime tracker you can use. IMHO, if you want to resell your service, you should be able to provide the guarantee, not the host you're reselling. They know there's no such thing.

Yes, I have an opinion.

Get a minimum 50% off with the "haveadreamyday" promo code, and... have a dreamy day. Original, no?

How much do they give you if they don't meet the guarantee?

I've really no idea. And am assuming it's only symbollic. But that's the whole point, even if they could not guarantee four nine's or five nine's they could say 99% uptime guanratee and a month off for every day your server is down. I think such a guarantee would be a good selling point IMO.

In reply to:
a month off for every day your server is down. I think such a guarantee would be a good selling point IMO.

No doubt, but potentially very costly. How much more would you be willing to pay per month for such a guarantee?

$30-40. In fact, I'd even pay $40/month and half the HD space and bandwidth (that go to waste) if there's such a guarantee. For my personal site and toolin' around my $7.95/month is more than enough...for my biz I cannot have such a blaise attitude.

This is what DH really needs