Reliability

A guestbook is only useful if it is there when a visitor clicks the link, this year and in ten years. UltraGuest has hosted guestbooks since 2003; our own demo guestbook was opened in January 2003 and is still online. We do not publish uptime percentages, but here is what is actually done to keep the service running.

A hosted service, looked after

Your guestbook lives on our servers, so hosting, bandwidth, software updates and security fixes are our job, not yours. The service was rebuilt in 2026 on current, supported software (PHP 8.5, MySQL 8.4 and the Laravel framework) and runs on a DigitalOcean server in New York, with Cloudflare's network in front of it for protection and delivery.

Watched, not hoped for

The server's scheduler reports a heartbeat every minute, and we are alerted when it stops. The content scans that run several times a day leave a record on the operator dashboard, which warns when a scan is overdue or its report could not be sent. Backups report failures by e-mail. Every deployment runs a self-test of the content rules and then checks that the important pages answer; if either fails, the deployment is marked failed and we are notified.

Backups and snapshots

The database is backed up every night, encrypted and kept for 30 days in separate storage, and the server is snapshotted weekly. The backups page has the details, including how to keep your own copy.

Built to stay small

Guestbook pages are plain HTML with no ads, no trackers and no third-party scripts apart from the human check on the sign form, so there is little that can break and little that depends on somebody else's servers. See speed.

Your guestbook stays as long as you use it

Guestbooks are not deleted for being old. Under the Terms of Service a guestbook that holds messages is never deleted for being quiet; only never-verified empty registrations and material that breaks the Acceptable Use Policy go. Nothing locks you in either: export everything as JSON or CSV whenever you like.