Many hosting companies are not being transparent when it comes to server maintenance.

These irresponsible web hosts normally do not provide clear maintenance schedule (probably because they are not planning at all) and cause a lot of unnecessary hassles to their users. Startlogic, however, is not one of these hosting companies.

In fact I’m quite impressed with Startlogic maintenance system. They are very organized and had planned 4 months ahead in server maintenance.

Exchange Hosting servers were having routine maintenance between 11:00pm EST on Friday, February 6 and 7:00am EST on Saturday, February 7, 2009; while further maintenance is set on March 13, April 17, May 15, as well as June 12 of year 2009. Users like you and me get to schedule our work accordingly when the maintenance schedule is told clearly.

Anyhow, in case you were uninformed for the recent Exchange Hosting server maintenance, worry not. Any mail sent to you during the maintenance period will be stored and delivered once the maintenance is complete.

A quick check on the site revealed the website server (StartLogic) uptime in September.

Quoting the site’s statement:

Startlogic uptime for september had recovered and improved to 99.86% uptime level, very near to the 99.9% service uptime guarantee level. With the average server response time of 0.196second, that is a fast server with good service uptime.

Verifying with my StartLogic hosting performance

The data seems pretty similar with my personal experience at StartLogic as I found StartLogic server is extra stable. It’s almost 100% uptime thru out past two months and I think they have been doing a good job on the server maintenance.

When you’re hosting with StartLogic, it’s important to know that the web host limits your MySQL usage. As in one of the latest notice released, StartLogic sets the bar at 50,000 MySQL queries per hour. Users who exceed the quota will be warned with an immediate notice (I suspect temporary account suspension might be the next consequences).

For your reference, here is the full version of the notice

MySQL QUERIES: 50,000 PER HOUR

To ensure optimum MySQL performance for all our customers, we are limiting the number of queries per login to 50,000 per hour and the duration of individual queries to 60 seconds.

This should not be an issue for the vast majority of customers — in fact, most customers will experience improved performance as a result of this measure. However, if you do suspect that you’re exceeding the query limit, log into your MySQL Management Tool, and if you’re over the limit, you’ll see a notice with more info.

We apologize for any inconvenience; however, on a shared hosting platform, there are practical limits to the amount of resources we can dedicate to individual customers. If this becomes an issue for you, you may be able to reduce the number of queries you are running by using application-level caching, combining queries or taking advantage of nested queries wherever you can.

My comment on this policy

Well calling this unfair on the limitations, StartLogic users should be happy that at least they are listing down the policy clearly.

It’s no secret that while shared hosting accounts nowadays are offered with unlimited bandwidth/disk storage, the hosting usage is limited by computer’s resources. In fact many other web hosts wouldn’t list down the policy clear and surprise their users with a sudden-suspend on their hosting account (due to overusing server resources).

Also 50,000 queries per hour should be pretty sufficient for most website. As said, the policy should not be an issue for the vast majority of customers; whereas, most customers will experience improved performance as a result of this measure.