99.9% Uptime - What does it mean to your website?

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

99.9% Uptime - What does It mean to your website?

Many internet web hosting companies boast about what great uptime they give you. What does uptime mean? It’s how often a site is running and accessible at any moment of time. Good server administrators can keep an eye on your servers that host your website and can often deliver such reliability, but what does 99.9% of uptime equate to?

Do some simple math. In a year there is 365 days and 24 hours in each day equaling 8,760 hours. If a host claims to offer 99.9% uptime, then you can expect your site to be down no more than 87.60 minutes a year or about one hour and 28 minutes. Jump to a 99.5% up time like some advertise and you are now at 131.40 minutes or 2 hours and 11 minutes.

Not to bad if you think about it considering there can be occasional maintenance and upgrades that may limit your site’s access, not to mention outside attacks by hackers which may temporarily shut down a server.

Can you live with that downtime? You may have no other choice, but think about how many people may never reach your site and may never return if they can reach it.

You can monitor your website by using a free server offered by BasicState.com. They will sample your site’s accessibility occasionally and track what downtime they encounter. If you find your host is down more than they advertise you may want to contact them or even consider a different host.

Tags: server uptime
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