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How to Read a Hosting Provider's Incident History Before You Sign

Learn to read a hosting provider's public incident history, including affected services, timestamps and updates, before choosing a provider.

AI summary

This training page provides guidance on evaluating a hosting provider by analyzing their public incident history for transparency and reliability before committing to a service.

  • Public incident histories reveal a provider's service reliability better than marketing claims.
  • The guide explains how to interpret the components of an incident entry and the significance of reading timelines from the bottom up.
  • A lack of history or a permanently green status page may indicate a lack of transparency.
  • The training uses examples from ALCO to demonstrate both the content and the reality of incident reporting.

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About this training

Every hosting company's sales page says reliable. Almost none of them show you their bad days. A public incident history does - and learning to read one is the cheapest due diligence available before you sign anything.

This uses ALCO's own, including an outage that is not a good look for us, because that is exactly the point. What a real entry contains, how to read a timeline from the bottom up, and what an empty or permanently green status page actually tells you.

Then go and look at your current provider's.

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Talk with ALCO about how this guidance applies to your organization, your systems and the support your team needs.