When you have a website and want to host it on the internet, you need a good web hosting service that will suit 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, customer support, and more importantly, the web hosting uptime guarantee.
The uptime guarantee is offered by many website hosting companies to support how good their service is.
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It is almost impossible to provide a 100 percent uptime guarantee. Most of the top-quality web hosting companies offer a 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 hosting web 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 upon its uptime.
There are many web hosting service providers who monitor their web servers and other equipment daily. Almost all the top-class website hosting services have their own technical support department that constantly works to make sure that they provide an 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 operate 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 website ever becomes unresponsive.
InternetSeer provides a free monitoring system that will check your website every 60 minutes. If your website needs to be monitored more closely, both Alertra or InternetSeer have to pay for monitoring plans that are very thorough.
Uptime guarantee
Most web hosting companies offer 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 a 99.9% uptime guarantee, you will most likely assume that it refers to your website as 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!
1 Comments
Hosting downtime is directly related to accessibility because if a site is frequently down, it can't be indexed. If Google sends traffic to a website that's often down, that reflects poorly on Google. Sites that are frequently down tend to rank lower than sites that are always up. Google's #1 concern is creating a quality search experience for their users. If the page they direct people often down, that doesn't reflect well on the search engine. Note that, Downtime in practice is a factor only if your Web Hosting provider is really unreliable and has less than 97~98% uptime.
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