Web Hosting Uptime – What is it?

When someone refers to uptime in relation to web hosting, they are simply referring to the time a web hosting company will guarantee that a website stays online for. But contrary to common belief, no web host in the world can guarantee uptime of 100%, so this is always something to be wary of when checking out hosts.

The uptime of a website is obviously immensely important for a variety of factors. This is especially true for business websites as these depend totally on their clients. It would be highly unprofessional of a business to have a website that wasn’t up and online all the time. If this was the case, the business would not only lose potential clients, they may also lose current clients and suffer all the financial woes that go with this scenario. The site doesn’t even have to be down for any length of time; even momentary down time happening frequently could be enough to make visitors click elsewhere.

But when it comes to looking at a web hosting services uptime, it is vital to understand just what causes potential downtime. There are two types of downtime that could be classed as beneficial; there is also a third type that if present on any web hosting service should be avoided like the plague.

The two kinds of downtime that you shouldn’t really concern yourself overly with are the following: planned downtime, which is basically the time that the web hosts use to carry out reboots, software upgrades, etc. All good web hosts will give you more than ample warning for such occurrences. Then there are the downtimes that occur due to a problem occurring, meaning the web hosting service has to take the servers down for repair. Even in this situation though, the hosts should be able to give you some warning about when and how long this will be happening for.

The downtime you want to be avoiding is the unplanned sort. These can be caused for a number of reasons and a host that usually suffers from these problems will be well known to the community at large. The main reason for this type of downtime is too many sites hosted on the same server, therefore overloading the system. This is obviously more than enough reason to avoid the specific web host because you could have a site on the system that could just go down with no notice. This not only impacts on your professionalism as a web site owner, but also the professionalism of the web hosting service itself.

Now that uptime and downtime has been explained in brief, make sure you research your potential web hosting services uptime thoroughly before making a decision on its services; and don’t just go by what the potential web hosting services site is telling you either – do your own research. Try and use web hosting comparison sites to help you. As a rule of thumb, a good web hosting company will always offer a 99.9% uptime.