The Importance of Web Host Uptime Guarantees
It is a well-known fact that having a web site is an essential, if not the most essential, aspect of having a successful business in the twenty-first century. Time is money, and being available to assist your customers and fulfill their needs any time, day or night, gives your business an edge over competitors.
In a perfect world, everything would work as it should at all times. Common sense and experience show us that this is rarely, if ever, the case. Even the most efficient machines experience down time occasionally. This is also true of servers, which can significantly impact your online business.
Web hosting service providers are no exception to the down time rule. However, many providers have the ability to bring the websites up and running with very minimal lag time. When looking into a web hosting service, the uptime guarantee is a critical feature that is often overlooked. This can leave both you and your site visitors frustrated, especially if the down time becomes excessive.
Uptime Guarantee Standards
Generally speaking, most web hosting providers guarantee between 99% and 99.9% uptime for their services. Although 99% may sound quite great, the number can be deceiving. The differences experienced by .9% for business owners and customers alike can be huge, greatly impacting the level of commerce and satisfaction.
With that said, if you are looking into a web hosting service, you must consider just how much down time your site could potentially experience. The uptime guarantee of a web hosting service is crucial, and the potential for downtime based on the industry-standard percentages is calculated below:
• 99.99% Uptime: There are approximately 4.38 minutes of downtime per month or .073 hours per month, which is equal to 52.56 minutes per year or .876 hours per year
• 99.95% Uptime: Approximately 21.9 minutes per month or .365 hours per month, which is equal to 262.8 minutes per year or 4.38 hours per year
• 99.9% Uptime: Approximately 43.8 minutes per month or .73 hours per month, which is equal to 525.6 minutes per year or 8.76 hours per year
• 99.5% Uptime: Approximately 219 minutes per month or 3.65 hours per month, which is equal to 2628 minutes per year or 43.8 hours per year
• 99% Uptime: Approximately 438 minutes per month or 7.3 hours per month, which is equal to 5256 minutes per year or 87.6 hours per year.
Clearly, the most preferable uptime guarantee would be 99.99%, which leaves your site potentially down for less than one hour for an entire year. By the time a website only experiences the 99% uptime guarantee, the potential for loss related to downtime is a staggering 87.6 hours per year. As clearly outlined by the calculations, a few tenths of a percent can make a huge difference on the amount of time your site could experience potential outages.
Uptime guarantees are given by all web hosting service providers, but they are not all equal. In general, a quality web hosting company, such as HostMonster or IX Web Hosting, guarantees a solid 99.9% uptime, which only leaves the potential for downtime per month at approximately 45 minutes. For in-depth breakdowns of affordable web hosting providers, along with their uptime guarantees and much more information, read our extensive web hosting provider reviews.
Visit HostMonster Official Site
Visit IX Web Hosting Official Site
Related Articles
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- Why Reliable Web Hosting?
- How to Check Hosting Uptime Effectively
- How to Check a Web Hosting Company’s Uptime
- Web Hosting and Uptime
- How Important Is Uptime?
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In my opinion, it is very important to see such guarantees on a web hosting company. If they promise such quality however, you should make sure that is what you get. The great article above tells how much time is needed to meet that guarantee, and if the numbers are higher than those times, then you can probably contact customer service and get a price reduction or some kind of refund. Their could even be legal grounds to get reimbursed.
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It is very important to have the uptime to the maximum. Because professional bloggers would do paid post. If there is a failure in the uptime during the payment time, it will be a big issue for them. Many times, my friend has suffered like this. Hence it is always better to prefer maximum uptime for the professionals.
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I agree that having downtime guarantees is a very important thing. There are so many web hosts out there you want to go with someone who will gaurantee you site won’t be down for a significant amount of time. Why would you pay for something that would crash all the time??
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