Many website hosts advertise their service by displaying their uptime guarantee. It comes in different flavors, but the principle is clear: they promise to keep your website available throughout the month. If they fail to do so, they violate their guarantee and you have recourse.

Customers who are new to web hosting may be a bit confused by the uptime guarantee. That’s understandable for a number of reasons. First, many providers fail to live up to it and then make excuses about extenuating circumstances to the customer. Second, it is often difficult to identify when outages truly happen unless you have installed monitoring software on the server.

Below, we’ll explain what the promotional numbers mean and what they imply beneath the surface. We’ll also provide an overview regarding what you should expect from your hosting provider.

Statistics And Lost Minutes

Nearly all hosts offer at least 99.9% uptime. At first, that seems attractive. Your site will only be unavailable 0.1% of the month. But, let’s translate that 0.1% into a number of minutes. Assuming a 30-day month, there are 43,200 minutes. In this case, 0.1% would equal a bit over 43 minutes. Consider that in the context of operating a successful ecommerce store. Your store might attract thousands of people each day. As such, a 43-minute outage might translate into thousands of dollars in lost revenue or leads.

Extrapolate that loss over an entire year. If you were to lose 43 minutes each month, that would mean you would lose 516 minutes over 12 months. In other words, an entire 8-hour day.

Isn’t It Guaranteed?

Most web hosting providers offer a money-back guarantee in the event that they are “down” longer than their uptime agreement allows. This becomes even more confusing for the customer. You should ask the host to clarify what they define as downtime. They may only use a PING to determine whether they are “down.” If they’re not monitoring the web and mail servers, there is no way to know how much downtime has truly occurred. As such, there is no way to determine whether the uptime agreement has been violated.

Setting Your Expectations

First, identify your website’s busiest hours. You should be able to review your analytics for traffic and purchase patterns throughout the day. This is important. If your host is planning a maintenance outage on the server (for example, to add a database patch), you’ll want to make sure it happens outside of your busiest time.

You should also ask your host how often they monitor their servers. If they only do so once every hour, many smaller outages will never be detected. Similarly, find out whether monitoring is performed by a third party. If the servers are monitored in-house, a wide-scale power failure will prevent their systems from identifying and recording the outage.

When you’re looking for a web hosting provider for your site, consider their uptime guarantee as the beginning of your research, not the end. There are several points you’ll need to clarify with the host to ensure that their service is reliable.

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Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: web hosting, web host, server reliability, site statistics