Hosting firm reprimanded for 99.9% uptime claim

 

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By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 11 Jul 2012 at 10:09

WebHostUK has been told to stop claiming 99.99% uptime after a customer complained of three network failures in three months.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) investigated the firm's claim after a single customer complained about outages on the "shared hosting" plan, which starts from £14.99 a year.

According to the ASA, WebHostUK advertised a 99.9% uptime guarantee for shared and reseller web hosting. "It explained that for the server uptime guarantee, it [WebHostUK] calculated the total uptime of the server and not the uptime of any service running on the server," the ASA report said, with the hosting firm offering customers credit for any downtime or if the "guarantee" was breached.

The watchdog said that wasn't good enough and told the firm not to repeat the claims. "Because we had seen no evidence that WebHostUK provided a 99.9% server uptime, we concluded that the claim had not been substantiated and the ad was misleading," the ASA ruled,

The WebHostUK website continues to make the claim, however. "With our 99.99% uptime guarantee and 24/7 lightening fast support, our customers are proud to be a part of the most trusted and affordable UK hosting company."