Availability

As a high-quality hosting provider, we want our customers to be able to access our services without any interruptions. At the same time, we want to make our services as transparent as possible. Therefore, we publish comprehensive availability statistics.

Please note: A lot of hosting providers guarantee a 99.9% availability. This percentage may sound impressive, but it does not include service interruptions caused by maintenance works or act of God. In our statistics, we want to give you a complete overview, as our users do not care for the reason why they are not able to access e-mails or important data.

This report includes a number of technical details. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

To monitor our system, we employ a double-layered Nagios system. These services are monitored on all servers:

  • CPU load
  • Diskspace und Physical Disk Values
  • Memory Use
  • Ping
  • Hardware Values (Physical Hardware)
  • Network Traffic
  • Dienste

Moreover, components like SAN, Firewalls, ESX server and switches are being monitored.

Availability from 1 July to 31 December 2009

  • Exchange 2007 servers (Mailbox, Client Access, Hub and Edge servers): Availability of 99.941%. (Not available: 156 minutes in six months)
  • Network components, e.g. firewalls, switches, router and SAN switches: Availability of 99.998%. (Not available: 63 minutes in six months)
  • Physical servers, e.g. ESX servers, VirtualCenter, backup and monitoring servers): Availability of 99.968%. (Not available: 84 minutes in six months)
  • Storage Area Network (SAN) from Dell Equallogic: Availability of 100%.

Explanation of maintenance works (excerpts)

  • Between 21 and 22 November (11pm to 6am), SAN and network components were extended. These maintenance works were critical, therefore most Skyfillers SaaS services had to be switched off for a few minutes.
  • Because of increased storage space requirements for Hosted Exchange services, some mailboxes were not available for a few minutes during nighttime.
  • All Exchange servers were updated to newly released rollups after these were tested extensively. Due to our clustered server structure, this caused only a minimum of downtime.

As a matter of course, all maintenance works will be carried out on weekends or at nighttime, as we want to minimize the effects on our customers. Furthermore, all maintenance works can be found in the support center of our website.

Availability from 1 January to 30 June 2009

  • Exchange 2007 servers (Mailbox, Client Access, Hub and Edge servers): Availability of 99.9952%. (Not available: 13 minutes in six months)
  • Network components, e.g. firewalls, switches, router and SAN switches: Availability of 99.9997%. (Not available: 47 seconds in six months)
  • Physical servers, e.g. ESX servers, VirtualCenter, backup and monitoring servers): Availability of 99.9916%. (Not available: 22 minutes in six months)
  • Storage Area Network (SAN) from Dell Equallogic: Availability of 99.999%. (Not available: 158 seconds in six months).

Explanation of maintenance works (excerpts)

  • Because of increasing need for storage space for Hosted Exchange accounts, some mailboxes were not available for several minutes (maintenance works took place at nighttime).
  • All Exchange servers were constantly updated after we had conducted thorough tests of all new rollups. Due to the clustering of our servers, disruptions were reduced to the minimum.
  • On 27 April, e-mail delivery was delayed between morning and noon.
  • Overall, there were maintenance works conducted on several Exchange mailstores and public folder stores. In the six-month period, the non-availability was below two hours.

Availability from 1 July to 31 December 2008

  • Exchange 2007 servers (Mailbox, Client Access, Hub and Edge servers): Availability of 99.95%. (Not available: 132 minutes in six months)
  • Network components, e.g. firewalls, switches, router and SAN switches: Availability of 99.978%. (Not available: 58 minutes in six months)
  • Physical servers, e.g. ESX servers, VirtualCenter, backup and monitoring servers): Availability of 99.996%. (Not available: 11 minutes in six months)
  • Storage Area Network (SAN) from Dell Equallogic: Availability of 100%.

Explanation of maintenance works (excerpts)

  • In December, new current bars were added. Although we had to deactivate a number of servers, availability was not affected too much because of our virtualized cluster configuration.
  • In August, our Microsoft hosting platform was updated from version HMC 4.0 to HMC 4.5. During this update, a number of servers was not available.