Web Hosting Uptime: Everything You Need to Know

Updated on September 28, 2022

 

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Many are looking for affordable hosting for their web projects. Yes, you can really cut costs as much as possible by choosing the cheapest hosting services. But taking into account only the cost, you have to make sure whether the provider of cheap hosting can keep the site up at all times. Hence the name of the main indicator of any reliable service provider is uptime. This is where it is important to find a hosting provider that guarantees the right uptime. 

As you can see from this review, Fastcomet offers 99.9%, which is great.

Let’s dig deeper into website uptimes in this article in order to finally understand what it is in web hosting and how to measure it correctly. If you are impatient, you can already answer the question: “Is this site down?” right now. 

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What Is Uptime in Web Hosting? – Time Without Downtime

Uptime for a hosting provider is the time during which web servers are working properly. For the average user, this is the time your web host is up and in particular does not cause any downtime for their own online projects. Hence, any site that you host on these servers should also work without errors.

You may have come across or met web hosts that emphasize some kind of uptime guarantee like 99.9% or 99.99% to get attention. That’s right, this is usually indicated as a percentage. This metric lets you know how often your site is available and fully functional. The rest of the percentage is the time when your site is unavailable.

Let’s say a hosting provider offers 95% uptime. This means that their servers are down 5% of the time on average. It may seem that this is not so much. But even such a small percentage of downtime can ruin a business project if converted into minutes or hours of downtime per month.

So, uptime is a great indicator of how well a web host is keeping its systems running. This will help you estimate the worst downtime your web host could suffer from. Hence, it is important for you, as a customer, to choose a web host that can guarantee uptime when worst-case downtime is available and in the expected range.

How to Calculate Uptime? – A Simple Formula

It is worth remembering that uptime is almost always defined as a percentage of the time. So if the web hosting has 99% uptime, that means that the downtime is 1%. If we take a year (that is, 365 days = 8760 hours) as 100%, then 1% of downtime on average will take more than 3 days a year, or, to be precise, 87 hours and 6 minutes.

Then, in order to more accurately calculate the uptime, one simple formula is needed: subtract the total number of hours of downtime from the total number of hours in a year, divide this number by the total number of hours in a year and multiply by 100. For example, you already know that in the year there are 8760 hours (365 x 24). If your website has 10 hours of downtime per year, you have 8750 remaining. The calculation would be:

(8750/8760) x 100 = 99.88% (this is the site’s uptime). 

You might consider partnering with a company that offers a guaranteed uptime of 99.5% or better for non-commercial projects. But always keep users in mind, no matter what project you are running. They will start to think that your site is unreliable. Most likely, they will stop visiting and gradually your projects will disappear from sight, which is not very good for search engines and SEO. Therefore, when you are actively making money on the Internet (be it an online store or a casino), then it is important to find hosting with an uptime higher than 99.9%.

The best hosting providers aim for 99.9% uptime as defined in their service level agreement (SLA). Therefore, it is always important to pay attention to the percentage that your hosting service promises when you sign up for their service. 

Why Are Website Uptimes Important?

From the customer’s perspective, this data determines the reliability of the web hosting provider. For example, if your hosting provider promises 95% uptime, you could lose up to 36 hours per month due to server errors. And this, in turn, reduces the profit by 5% as well. At the same time, 99.9% uptime ensures that you lose less than an hour per month and less than 1% of profits due to server downtime.

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