I have had bad experience with my host. They promise you 99% uptime or something like that, the sites are always up and running but the mySQL database has often problems and it produces database errors which in turns makes my site inaccessible. When you visit it a database error appears instead of the site.

I was wondering if the uptime guarantee that many hosts offer normally covers the mySQL database server too or if it only covers the server where the files are hosted. Because technically speaking the server with the website has not gone down, it is a mySQL server database problem on their end and it sounds like they are using this loophole to avoid counting it as downtime.

Another problem I noticed is that I am using Pingdom to automatically notify me if my site goes down, but as it is only a database error I don’t get any alert.