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99.5%
Uptime Guarantee
This guarantee is extended to clients
as a safety measure, so clients can be confident of the reliability
of our service. If service is questionable, then you do not pay.
This guarantee extends to all clients
of ShonLee Studios. If, in one month
(example: March 1, 1998 to April 1, 1998), the average uptime of
all services is less than 99.5% according
to What's Up Gold, then you will
receive a one month extension on your account.
Services include HTTP (your website),
FTP (File Transfer Protocol), PCP (Personal Control Panel), Telnet,
SSH, Real Audio/Video, InfoChat, SSL, MySQL/MSSQL and SMTP &
POP3 (E-mail Services). These services are pinged every
minute of every day continuously by What's Up Gold by IP
Switch. This program is a network monitoring utility which will
keep an average percentage on the uptime of such services.
Limitations:
 Quality
of Service Guarantee
The fact that virtual server hosting is a shared
environment leads to concerns regarding quality of service. It is
important to restrict and limit what applications are executed in
this environment to ensure the actions of one user does not have
a noticeable adverse effect on the performance of the server, and
degradation of quality of service. These issues have been a main
topic for many web hosting providers with the following common solutions:
 Load
Balancing: A user with excessively high system resource consumption
is moved to a server with less demand on system resources, thus
balancing loads among users depending on levels of demand.
Resource
Division Tactics: A more popular approach which divides memory,
processor runtime, number of processes running, and does bandwidth
throttling in the OS kernal.
For various reasons, we believe neither
of the two common approaches above are good long-term solutions.
Neither addresses the problem with a long-term solution. Therefore,
we have devised our own solution to this issue.
Our solution is that virtual server clients
eventually evolve into dedicated server clients. Simply put, a virtual
server solution is not scalable and not meant for a "high-volume"
website with dynamic content, which requires an "excessive"
amount of system resources. Rather than accommodating and degrading
QoS, we encourage virtual server clients who meet this criteria
(less an 3% historically) to move to a dedicated server, which is
ideal for their needs. It is important for clients to understand
that Quality of Service is lower on a virtual server solution than
a dedicated server since it is a shared versus a non-shared environment.
Limiting
Quality of Service Degradation
In accordance with our Acceptable Uses Policy,
if we find that any virtual server client is consuming an "excessive
amount of CPU and/or RAM", AND that client is having a noticeable,
adverse effect on the performance of that particular server, than
ShonLee Studios
will immediately find and terminate the cause of such problem. These
cases are usually poorly written Perl scripts, PHP scripts which
excessively (>50 simultaneous connections) query the local mySQL/Microsoft
SQL database server, and similar issues isolated to a single user.
If the incident is tracked to a particular
user but the cause within the account is unknown, ShonLee
Studios may immediately suspend the user's account without
warning in the interest of maintaining Quality of Service for all
other users on that particular server. While this policy may upset
the offending user, the other 99.9% of our clients will appreciate
the consistent Quality of Service.
If the same user continues to degrade Quality of Service, then ShonLee
Studios will ask that client to either upgrade to a dedicated server
solution or find another hosting provider for their account.
Network
Performance Monitoring
ShonLee Studios guarantees that at
no time will our network traffic, both internal or external, become
congested to the point of latency greater than 3 milliseconds going
out of our network from our core router. Latency going out of our
network can be tested at anytime via our traceroute utility. Furthermore,
to substantiate our non-congestion claim on network traffic, ShonLee
Studios makes all MRTG graphs to both transit bandwidth providers
as well as long-haul circuits available for public viewing. Overall,
we guarantee network availability 99.99%
of the time per month.
Price
Freeze Guarantee
Our price freeze guarantee ensures clients that
they are locked into a set monthly rate as long as they remain a
client in good standing of ShonLee
Studios.
Today, some of the earliest clients continue
to enjoy all of our current features for the $10.95 flat-fee charged
in early 1997. By becoming a client and keeping your business with
us long-term, we vow not to raise your monthly rate at any time
in the future.
Limitations
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