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Do providers fib about downtime?
You've had a number of instances of downtime: as you edit your pages and its been logged on the monitoring service too - ten minutes here and there, fair enough it's reseller. But there are two similar instances of about 100 minutes and so on...
You contact the hosting company (which now seems to have moved to overseas support) and you're told there has been no downtime. But here's the thing, a month further on from your ticket and you've had no downtime at all.
That's a bit of a coincidence isn't it?
Comments
I have no idea what I just read.
a detective novel narration?
Ok for those who are challenged or for whom English is perhaps not their first language: you have regular instances of downtime over many weeks. Support tells you there hasn't been any downtime. But then magically the problem seems to be resolved and you then have no downtime at all for a month.
Do hosting providers fib about downtime?
I think it’s about including fiber in your diet.
well to be fair, among the hosts I have tried no one ever lied and have always stated reasons
and did you show them your uptime monitor page or like the logs ? I think that would have helped and if you did so and they still didn't accept it I can't say anything other than not hosting anything essential there 
Even your close family members might lie. Therefore, some providers might also lie, of course. We are all human. However, to confirm this, you need to use tools. For example, if you lose connection to your server, run MTR or similar tools before anything else. In most cases, you will find a problem with the MTR output.
If you find a problem with connectivity, report it to the provider with evidence, and get a response from the provider that everything is okay on their end without any attempts at investigation - they are definitely trying to hide the problem.
Same about CPU theft and other parameters. Please note that in most cases VPS providers rent uplinks and can't handle issues outside their data centers.
I hope this messageboard isn't going to descend into bullying? It was a genuine question. Perhaps I should have taken more care in writing my original post so it was clearer but I won't stick around to be part of something that is like this.
I've had hosting for nearly 30 years and I've had this experience on many occasions. They said the server had run for three weeks with no downtime so it didn't get to the point where I gave them logs. When Cloudflare and the monitoring service say the server is down it's difficult to see what else it might be.
You need some downtime to reload.
Booolying is bad sar
maybe do what @rustelekom suggested [not that I am sure] but it might give some clarification and if it still exists open a ticket with all this info [like the next time this happens] and probably not renew the services again? if they still don't give reasons and improve their uptime....since it wouldn't make sense do so [like as I think] to renew services of a provider, as first because of the frequent downtime and second because the dishonesty too...
I'm sorry, but it's hard to understand what you are saying.
Aren't you saying they did? Anyway it's a spectrum. Some go so far as to put up fake status pages, but no they don't /all/ lie. Apparently yours does. What kind of downtime are you talking about anyway, connectivity?
Also don't be a condescending bully, your original message made no sense.
It is possible that your specific VM had an issue that was unrelated to the hypervisor/network as a whole. It's a lot less likely, but I have definitely seen it happen where someone has something misconfigured or firewall rules that aren't happy within their own system and after checking with us they eventually narrow it down and solve it.
On the flip side, recently a user from this forum opened up a ticket and caught something nearly unnoticeable on a VPS they have with us. It was slight enough that no monitoring ever picked it up, but we had a cable that was damaged causing one side of an LACP to very intermittently flap and retransmit/get pocket loss but not enough for anything to pick-up/flag (especially with the other side of the link being fine). Despite being able to tell this user was very technically savvy, they immediately provided bilateral MTR's and all early stage requested troubleshooting info which made it simple for us to verify, escalate, and eventually pin down.
Status wise I'd say it depends. Some are completely fake in practice--but usually it's not outright nefarious. They're just monitoring something that isn't quite accurately reflecting the health of the network all the way to end gear or it's not being properly monitored from an external public route. They might also only be monitoring up to their core infrastructure. In the beginning that is all we monitored as well, it was a big change for us to add in individual hypervisors, but it had to be automated before I wanted it rolled out. Generally though, the majority of hosts I talk to or that I've dealt with are honest with their status page readings.
That makes sense. Having some kind of monitoring or MTR data definitely helps when reporting issues, saves time and avoids blame games.
Mentally strong provider owns a richly connected network that peers with many other networks.
That's why we develop on Cloudflare Workers, where congestion is unheard of.
For customers, CF is very useful, but unfortunately, in Russia, at least some of their IPs are banned due to various reasons, and this makes CF useless for people in Russia.
fib, are we 5 years old or just like a mega prude
I've no doubt some do lie. Hosting providers aren't some special class of people who are incapable of lying, and people lie.
Your problem is defining downtime. You're talking about monitoring services marking the server as down, but they only know whether or not they can connect to specific services running on the server. They can't monitor the server directly.
If the server's got 100% uptime, there's been no downtime. What about network? What about routing issues? A provider can only control their own network so if there are issues on the route between your server and the server doing the monitoring it'll look like downtime, but that doesn't mean the server was ever actually down.
The provider can look at their own internal monitoring, which will show them that the server has had zero downtime. They're not lying just because someone was unable to connect to the server from outside their network.
TBH, I thought it was you who were the non-native speaker, because your writing sounds like either a Choose Your Own Adventure novel or a Jay McInerney novel.
You're the one referring to people who don't understand your writing as "challenged".
To answer your question, of course some do. The better ones do not.
It depends on how the provider defines downtime. If I'm only polling every 15 minutes, my status page may show all green even if I was down for 5 minutes.
But really, why argue with a provider? How can you win? If they're unreliable today, getting them to admit something does not fix them.
There's a galaxy of providers. If you don't like one, just move to another.
I am British and English is my language and it has been my career too.
I wrote that after someone posted, as the first reply, the flippant response: "I have no idea what I just read." It was clear what my post was about. But perhaps I was tired when I wrote it, I can't remember. I should have written it in a way that was more straight forward.
At no point did I say I was arguing with a provider. I simply asked about downtime.
Thanks to everyone who posted advice - greatly appreciated. For several years I have tried to take part here and have commented under articles to support the website too. But I don't like forums where the first instinct is to attack. So I won't post anything again except where there's a double bandwidth offer. Have fun!