Uptime is the period of time that the server has been running. It is generally listed as the percentage, such as “99.9% of uptime.” Uptime is the best measure to know how good the hosting provider is in keeping the systems up & running. Suppose the web hosting provider has the high uptime percentage, that means their servers is up and running, any website that you host must stay up & running too. As Web pages cannot retain customers if it is down, uptime is highly important.

WHY WEBSITES GO DOWN

There are lots of potential causes of a site to return. What is more, the exact cause frequently involves many distinct reasons culminating in an enormous issue.

• Traffic endings: Probably the primary cause of sites going down are abrupt spikes in traffic. These could be brought on by a surge of viral visitors out of Reddit, BuzzFeed, or even Quora. A trusted hosting provider with the necessary means to guarantee uptime in these situations is the only way you’re able to keep your website up and to function.

• Scheduled care: Even sites with superior optimization need to be scheduled maintenance from time to time. Care should occur during short intervals to lessen its possible adverse effect.

• Hacker strikes: Hackers can deliver a site down in several distinct ways: they could overload the servers using DDoS attacks, inject malicious code, or even steal safety credentials, forcing the site proprietors to close off the website and take care of the issue.

• Data center problems: Several phases of downtime may be brought on by the hosting company itself. In cases like this, site uptime tracking tools come in especially handy because they allow you to gauge how reliable that your hosting firm is accurate.

• Site’s code problems: Poor programming may cause a heavy load on servers, lead to various database mistakes, and, finally, create the website entirely unresponsively.

Different aspects may bring a site down, for example, domain name (DNS) expiration, and domain seizure, takedown by law enforcement. However, those are inclined to be not as expected.

WHY YOUR SITE NEEDS TO STAY UP

Consider your site as you need a physical shop. If a client wants to pay a visit to your shop but finds it shut, you will not earn any cash. What is worse, the client is very likely to proceed to one of the competitions, which may hurt you in the long term.

Google may also penalize your website’s rank in their search results page, decreasing the amount of traffic you’re getting. Based on how intense this punishment is, it might take weeks until you recover entirely, and, at the time, your clients may be long gone.

Your new image will radically improve when you figure out how to create your companies accessible whenever a visitor inputs your own site’s URL to the address bar of their browser. You’ll be perceived as dependable, dependable, and specialist.

Problems with Grading the Web Host in Uptime

Biggest problem to grade the host on uptime is you normally need no way to verify this. Suppose the host says that they have around 99.9% of uptime, you need to take this at their word. However, there is more to it and uptime is always defined as the percentage of time.  Uptime percentages are quite misleading. Having 99% of uptime sounds very good, but it can mean three day outage each year.

Can Uptime be Misleading?

Uptime guarantees aren’t generally what you may think that they are. Till your web hosting agreement is different from each other hosting agreement that I have ever seen uptime guarantee the works.

Let us break this down:

Unscheduled outages – The hosting service might call this something else, what it means is if they allow you to know that they will be performing the server upgrade on next weekend, your site will stay down for around 72 hours, and this isn’t covered in the uptime guarantee. Most of the hosts do not take the sites down for 4 hours and more, but problems will happen, and that depends on the hosting agreement, and longer than the anticipated maintenance outages won’t kick in uptime guarantee.

How long was your downtime? – We know 3.6 hours every month is around 99% uptime. Thus, any period of time your website is down below this time is within 1% of outage rate they guarantee.

Refunding cost of hosting – It is one very important part. Suppose your website earns around $1000 per month in the sales and your site is down for say 4 hours, you have lost $5.56. Most of the hosting packages cost over $10 to 20 per month. Thus they can refund you 6 to 12 cents.

Reporting the outage – lots of uptime guarantees refund only if you report any outage. Then they refund you for amount of time you have noticed your website was down. It is fine in case you’ve the monitoring systems to allow you know when your website goes down & comes back again. However, most of us do not, so you will not be reimbursed for full outage in case you do not know how long this was.

Uptime Issues on Software and Hardware

Uptime is the reflection on how long your machine is running and your site stays up. But your machine can come up and start working but your website gets down. Suppose you are not maintaining Web server software (other software like databases and PHP) for your website, you must ensure your webhosting agreement includes the guarantees for software running time and hardware uptime.