One of the websites I administer recently had a database failure that knocked the site offline for 12 hours. It was at one of the big, cheap hosting ISPs, where things work fine when they work fine, but problems are unpredictable and slow to be fixed when they occur, particularly at night.
Since I do not actually administer the parts that were broken, and am limited to the small set of oink-and-click tasks that can be accomplished through their control panel interface, all I could do was report it as a critical failure that needed urgent attention. I awaited, and expected, urgent action.
The site was down for 12 hours with no response before it came back up, and along the way, I saw that the support ticket had been downgraded from “high,” as I submitted it, to “medium” priority.
So. A 12-hour primary systems failure on a site with thousands of daily users is “medium” priority.
You get what you pay for, I guess. What do you expect for $7/month?
I guess I find myself in angry-old-man-waving-cane-at-kids mode when I say this, but I still have to: this kind of shit doesn’t happen on MY servers. I take system administration seriously. If a site is down, you drop everything and get it running again, fast. It is not OK for a site to be offline for 12 hours. It’s not OK for a site to be offline for 12 minutes. You don’t get 1500 days of uptime on primary servers with this kind of slack-jawed mentality. Just amazing.
/rant off.