We find it laughable when a hosting provider running web content from a single server in a single location "guarantees" that your service will have 99.99% up-time. This means that they are guaranteeing that your service will be down no more than 4.38 minutes in any given month.

Even a preventive maintenance shutdown is likely to take your service off-line for 20 minutes. If your server kernel-panics, or otherwise crashes, the minimum time to bring it back on line is probably 30 to 40 minutes, if instantly detected - detection is never "instant." We marvel when a server runs for 200 days straight without a panic. Such clean events as preventive reboots and panics will occur several times a year in a normal server.

If the broken system has a serious hardware problem it may be days before it is back on line. Similarly, restoring data from tape onto another machine (if daily saves are made) is a multi-hour complex reconstruction process that can only begin after a hoster determines that a primary server is "dead."

Even guaranteeing 99.9% uptime (no more than 52 minutes downtime in a month) is difficult in a single server and location environment, though practicable in most months. But the bottom line with most guarantees is that the hoster promises to give you some money back (most often pro-rata) if you find out that you were down in a given month.

What matters more than promises is designed reliability.

Easy Computing Company has hosting centers in two different locations: California and Pennsylvania.

We offer you the ultimate in Internet technological reliability - mirrored servers.

When your content simultaneously runs on two different machines using two different sources of bandwidth, your service keeps running in spite of common failures, because the browsers accessing the server will automatically switch to the alternate server in about 30 seconds if they do not get a response from the primary. Both servers must fail before service is fully interrupted. The statistical odds of twin failures, as we design for 99.9% average reliability, are 0.1% of 0.1%, or 0.0001%.

To our knowledge, no other company offers actively mirrored hosting service at our reasonable prices and as part of a standard service. Active mirroring is normally an extremely expensive option. Our search of the web suggests that the next-least-expensive offering effectively starts at around $200 per month, with most solutions costing thousands of dollars per month. Similarly, others offering active mirroring do not provide the transparent synchronization we include -- instead, you are responsible for moving content twice. The difference is that we have invested in the engineering to make it a mass-marketable product at reasonable prices.

Here's what mirroring means to you: