What is Uptime?
If you have ever signed up to or looked at a web hosting plan, you will have likely seen claims such as “Guaranteed 99.9% uptime”. The question is ‘What is Uptime?’ This article sets about answering that question.
Uptime can be defined as “The amount of time that your website is available for visitors”. It is usually expressed as a percentage – so 99.9% uptime means your site your site will potentially be up and running for 99.9% of any given period. If we take a month as the period of time, 99.9% uptime equates to 43,156 out of 43,200 minutes in a 30-day month. This means the downtime would be just 44 minutes for that same month.
Just 44 minutes downtime over a whole month sounds extremely impressive, but it is not always as clear cut as that. Sometimes problems arise which are beyond the control of the hosting company – mass power failure, acts of God etc, and sites on their server(s) will be down for longer than the percentage figure would indicate. The hosting company is simply saying that 99.9% uptime is the figure that they aim for, and if they fail to meet that target you will likely be offered compensation for the additional downtime you have suffered.
A standard method of compensation is a reduction in monthly fee for the user. If the web host only managed to achieve say 95% uptime over the month, then user’s fees would be reduced by 5% for the following month. It is important to bear in mind that the website owner has be aware that the site was down for an extended period in order to claim for this fee reduction – the hosting company will not offer the reduction off their own backs. Another problem with downtime is that a 5% fee reduction could knock off as little as 30 cents from your monthly fees – lost business is likely to have cost you a lot more than this.
It is important that when looking at a web hosting plan you read the terms and conditions regarding uptime/downtime, and see what their definition of a ‘guarantee’ is. Natural disasters – for example if an earthquake destroys their servers, are unlikely to be covered, and hardware and software upgrade time can often be discounted from the guarantee. This can mean that any time software needs to be patched, and hardware upgraded or maintained your site may experience downtime, and you will not have any recourse on this.
An uptime guarantee and a compensation structure are good benefits to have when signing up with a web hosting company, but do not be allured into thinking that you will definitely get this amount of uptime - the ’99.9%’ adverts are promoting the company’s target figure. A better way of getting a true indication of a web hosting company’s uptime is to speak to existing customers, or carry out Internet searches for forums, blogs and articles which will give you personal accounts of user’s experiences.