Hosting Uptime Guarantee – What Does it Mean
One of the most used (over used) and confusing terms in the web hosting industry is the hosting uptime guarantee. The uptime guarantee is simply a promise from the hosting company to you that your site will be up for a certain percentage of time every month. The standard guarantee (and average) is 99.9%. The most reliable of the cheap hosting companies will guarantee a minimum uptime of 99.9% and I would avoid any cheap hosting provider that offers anything less, but what does this number mean and what will it get you.
The chart below should help you understand what the numbers mean to you. You should keep in mind the guarantee is based on a monthly figure.
Hosting Uptime Guarantee in Real Time
99.5% uptime guarantee = 216 minutes of downtime
99.8% uptime guarantee = 86.4 minutes of downtime
99.9% uptime guarantee = 43.2 minutes of downtime
99.99% uptime guarantee = 4.32 minutes of downtime
99.999% uptime guarantee = 0.432 minutes of downtime (approx 26 seconds)
So as you can see above, a hosting provider offering a 99.9% uptime guarantee is letting you know that there may be some down time, but it will be limited to 43.2 minutes per month.
So why would your site be down and how come no one guarantees 100% uptime? Well the answer is very simple – stuff happens. Servers do crash, they can get hacked, they need maintenance, a bandwidth provider can go down, and any other number of things. Like I said… stuff happens.
So what does the guarantee get me? Well that is the interesting part. Some companies will offer to give you a free month of hosting and others will prorate your next hosting charge and some offer nothing at all. To find out what your hosting company offers, check out their terms of service or sla (service level agreement) agreements. Also, keep in mind the hosting companies have protected themselves very well and it will be hard to prove any downtime unless it is serious and across several servers or company wide.
How hard can it be you ask? Well hosting companies generally do not accept 3rd party monitoring company’s downtime reports and any proof you do submit will have to be accepted and approved by the hosting company. Once accepted, the hosting company will then approve or deny any compensation. So as you can see, getting reimbursed for the downtime will be extremely difficult and probably not worth the hassle. Also, certain instances such as hurricanes, tornadoes, ddos attacks, hackers and other “acts of God” or extenuating circumstances will not be covered.
So as you can see, that number really means nothing and you cant really do anything about it. That being said, there are some hosting companies that offer excellent uptime, check them out below
KnownHost – Awesome hosting company with excellent uptime
Downtown Host – Stellar hosting company with solid uptime guaranteed
HostGator – One of the larges hosting companies around with stellar performance and uptime
GoDaddy – Another of the big cheap hosting companies offering solid hosting uptime
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
