The word “uptime” means "trouble-free work time".

At present the situation with quality of services in respect of stability, is clear enough. It, the quality, is more less for all equal and practically does not depend on hoster sizes. 100% uptime, i.e. real operation in a current of 24 hours a day during the whole year, nobody can provide. It is an axiom whatever they say, as people remain people, and engineering remains engineering. Both of them can get ill and breaks accordingly. Another matter is: if your hoster is an organisation, but not a private person, the risk of any trouble like hard disk burning or shortage of money is brought to naught.

However, it is necessary to notice that there are breakages which are impossible to solve in 5 minutes, especially (here comes a true story) if a line adapter of a special company burns on Friday at 19.00. Such device is impossible to buy at a computer store round the corner. Lucky the company will be if there is a spare chassis (the chassis is the package consisting of the motherboard with the tank and necessary "stuffing"),everything will be done in a couple of hours of idle time by moving hard disks from the problem computer to the working computer.

To pay attention to the statements like "for 6 months we have already had a 100 % uptime", it is not worthy. The situation is possible if a hoster exists just half of a year and has about 20 clients. In such conditions it is not a problem to provide excellence of services in general. Another situation is with the companies of an average layer (from 500 clients and above) and, for sure, with much bigger companies. From 10 available servers we put one server on public monitoring on which the site of the provider works only and we receive 100 % uptime in Unix Hosting. And this does not matter that uptime for clients is below 95 %. You, as the client, will get to know about it later.

Do not trust different advertisements on providers' servers, for instance, about price decrease or peculiar actions arrangement limited to definite time frames. If examining closely you will notice that this reduction of prices for one service can simply denote the increase in some other services (this is the point about which the provider usually prefers not to talk to, and any special season action like «free domain if you pay for 5-year hosting» then will turn into the next 5 years hot action.

Another advertising fooling us is how providers involve clients is advertising about service limitlessness: e.g., quantity of e-mail addresses, traffics or subdomains. In reality, the unlimited traffic is total lie: just an attendance of the most sites is not so large and the provider can give it to you, let it be some minimum volume of traffic according to a certain tariff plan. Only provider knows the borders of the limit are: the traffic limit can be omitted on a server or it can be mentioned, but not on the same page where a price-list for services is. Users will see that they went beyond a certain limit only later, when the provider asks to change tariff schedule.

Unlimited quantity of e-mail addresses is also, to tell the truth, a fairy-tail|: that is to say, there can be as much e-mail addresses as it is possible, but actually all letters will come in one mail box. And an unlimited amount of mail boxes cannot existas well: their quantity in any case is limited by the size of each box, their cumulative size cannot go beyond the common disk quota within the limits of the tariff schedule.

Another matter is CGI-script support. Different providers can mean absolutely controversial things. If the hosting-provider promotes that the company supports CGI-scripts, make sure that this service involves not only possibility of using a definite standard set of yet installed scripts (generally this set includes a guest book, counters a forum, a chat, etc., that is a normal set of tools and for servers of free hosting), but also a chance of your own scripts usage.

Not always all these "peculiarities" are accurately listed on a hosting-provider site. It has one clever explanation: too detailed description can be too large for reading and a common user will not understand all those nuances.

From the other side the provider can be not always interested in a very detailed description of the services. After all, the most difficult thing is to involve a new client, and keeping a person's will to be a client is another story. The given rule works as a bright example when it concerns domains registration. Say, very often at primary purchase of hosting for any large period of time (usually it takes 6 or 12 months) providers register a free domain for the client . But the “discount” like this is very frequently one-time bonus and works only at the first order. In 12 months a domain re-registration, most likely, will cost money.

What is more, frequently the domain is registered not on the client but on the hosting-provider. This makes almost impossible for the client to change the provider.