If you have recently been searching for web hosting for your domain, you may have come across the word “Uptime.” Every web hosting company mentions its uptime along with the disk space and bandwidth. So, in this article, we will find out what is uptime and how much uptime is right for your business.
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What is Web Hosting Uptime?
Uptime is the measure of the online time of web hosting (without going offline). It is majorly represented in a percentage format and calculated monthly. So if a hosting server is continuously serving the connection throughout a month, then it means that it has 100% uptime. So, the higher the uptime, the better the web hosting company. However, getting 100% uptime always is not possible in a real-world scenario.
Why is Uptime Important?
- It makes your online brand reliable for customers
- Higher uptime means maximum profit to your business
- High uptime means better search engine appearance
Uptime is the most critical factor while choosing a web hosting company. It doesn’t matter how feature-rich is your web hosting company because, in the end, it always comes down to Uptime. Think it like this way, your web hosting is performing great and can handle a lot of traffic very well, however, due to low uptime, it is going offline frequently. In this case, your readers/customers may not like it very much, and in general, you may end up losing them. That is why Uptime has become an important factor in online growth because nobody likes to visit an offline page.
Online giants like Youtube, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat maintain their uptime up to 100% by deploying multiple servers in different locations across the globe. Even a slight 0.01% of downtime cost them a couple of millions of losses.
How Good is 99.9% Uptime Guarantee?
Let’s assume that a web hosting company has a 99.9% uptime guarantee; however, that does not necessarily mean that they are committed delivering that much uptime. Various other factors impact uptime such as schedule maintenance of servers, the physical crashing of servers, outage, etc. So this downtime is never mentioned in the “uptime guarantee,” and you may find it in the terms and condition area of a web host.
Nowadays, the industrial standard uptime is 99.9% which means, 0.1% downtime. Check this calculation.
If uptime is 100%
- 30 (days) x 24 (hours) = 720 (hours per month)
With 100% uptime, your website will never go down.
If uptime is 99.9%
- 0.1% of 720 (hours) = 43.2 minutes (downtime per month)
With 99.9% of uptime, your website will go down for approximately 43 minutes every month.
If uptime is 99.99%
- 0.01% of 720 (hours) = 4.32 minutes (downtime per month)
With 99.99% of uptime, your website will go down for approximately five minutes every month.
So, 99.9% uptime is good but not excellent. Currently, several web hosts are serving uptime of 99,99% (as per the last ten months’ performance average).
How Many Nines Do You Really Need in Uptime?
In short, as much as you can get. However, I will try to explain how much uptime is right for your business. Check this image below.
In the case study, I found that according to today’s competitive standards, any uptime above 99.97% can be considered as an excellent uptime. In addition to this, uptime below 99.8% is the worst uptime. So your web hosting company should provide you with three or more nines. For more uptime information, please check here.