Web Host - Uptime

Web Hosting Uptime – Why Is It Important?

When you have a website and want to host it on the internet, you need a good web hosting service that will suite your website’s needs. Choosing a perfect web hosting service is almost impossible as every website has different needs, and all those needs cannot be met by a single web hosting service. For example the bandwidth, the disk space, the control panel that is offered, web tools, various add-ons, applications, firewalls, the customer support, and more important, the web hosting uptime guarantee.

The uptime guarantee is offered by many website hosting companies to support how good their service is. It is almost impossible to offer 100 percent uptime guarantee. Most of the top-quality web hosting companies offer 99.9 percent uptime guarantee, which is considered to be very good, which means that the web server would be down just for a very small duration only. In general, the web hosting uptime is the time a web server is active online. The higher the uptime guarantee, the better is the web hosting service and more are the chances the web visitors visit your website creating more opportunities for profits for your business website.

The uptime guarantee is not only important to the huge online business websites, but also for any individual’s normal website. If your website is off the internet for any reason, your visitors get annoyed. The visitors of any website are spread all over the world, and at any given point in time, the website must be available for access. The online business critically depends up on its uptime. There are many web hosting service providers which monitor their web servers and other equipments daily. Almost all the top-class website hosting services have their own technical support department that constantly works to make sure that they provide excellent uptime guarantee.

Monitor Server Uptime

Nearly all web hosts will advertise and guarantee a "99.9%" or higher uptime percentage. However, these guarantees are about as trustworthy as a used car salesman, not very! If a host has a history of a great uptime performance they will post a history of their uptime performance, monitored by a 3rd party, such as Alertra or InternetSeer. Additionally, web hosts that operates on a redundant network (more than one data line to the internet) will be more reliable than a web host that is running only a single data line. If you have already signed up for a web host you can use a 3rd party to constantly monitor your site's uptime and be instantly notified by email if your web site ever becomes unresponsive. InternetSeer provides a free monitoring system that will check your web site every 60 minutes. If your web site needs to be monitored more closely, both  Alertra or InternetSeer have pay for monitoring plans that are very thorough.

Uptime guarantee
Most of web hosting company offers 99.9% uptime guarantee. It means that your website will be up and running at least 99.9% of the time during any 12-month period. This guarantee includes network uptime, server uptime, web server and service uptime.

The initial thought when you hear about a 99.9% uptime guarantee is: "My website will be up 99.9% of the time!"

Is it server or network uptime?

This is something that often isn't expressed directly by hosts. You see, if a hosting company claims 99.9% uptime guarantee, you will most likely assume that it refers to your website being online 99.9% of the time. However, often hidden in the TOS or SLA of the host, you find that their uptime guarantee refers to the network, not the actual server.

To put this into real life words, the server can be down and thus your site inaccessible, but as long as their network is up they still respect their uptime guarantee and you're not entitled to a refund! So read the terms of service carefully before you sign-up with a host !