Uptime and Downtime in Web Hosting Offers

When looking for a suitable web hosting provider, you will quickly come across information about the uptime or downtime of the hosting. We will now explain in the following article what these values mean and what should be considered when choosing a hosting provider.

Owners of their own website must inevitably expect downtime from time to time. It is of little importance whether you are using an affordable Shared Hosting package or a Dedicated Server. Outages, also known as downtimes, occur with all types of web hosting. Naturally, the likelihood of an outage is higher on Shared Hosting, as additional factors such as the influence of other customers or higher system loads come into play. For website owners, downtimes are a serious matter as the unavailability of their website can have a negative impact on visitor numbers and therefore the website's revenue. Although most web hosting providers guarantee an uptime of around 99%, it is unlikely that your website will always be 100% accessible.

Tip: Using a website monitoring tool can help keep track of downtimes, allowing for quick responses to outages.

Various Types of Downtimes

The causes of website unavailability are numerous and can generally be divided into two categories that website owners must be prepared for.

Unplanned Downtimes

This category includes all causes that lead to the sudden outage of a website without prior warning. This can have various reasons such as:

• Failure of server technical components
• Failure of technical infrastructure in the data centre
• Software issues
• Human errors
• Force majeure events such as disasters or accidents

Planned Downtimes

Since both hardware and software of every server need regular maintenance, outages can also occur in connection with software updates or hardware upgrades. However, these are announced in advance by the web hosting provider and are usually carried out at times when there are few visitors on the website anyway. Maintenance work is often scheduled for the night hours.

What Does Uptime Mean?

Uptime is the opposite of Downtime and refers to the period in which the server, along with websites, is online and accessible. The servers have power, are connected to the internet, and are reachable for external visitors. The Uptime is typically expressed by the web hosting provider as a percentage, referring to the time during which the servers are accessible. Through internal security measures and backup systems, the hosting provider ensures to maintain the Uptime as high as possible.

But what do the percentage figures mean exactly?

• 99.9% Uptime equates to a maximum of 1 hour of Downtime per month
• 99.95% Uptime equates to a maximum of 30 minutes of Downtime per month
• 99.99% Uptime equates to a maximum of 5 minutes of Downtime per month

No provider can offer 100% Uptime. There are simply too many factors such as network issues, power supply, hardware failures, software problems, human errors that could cause an outage. Nevertheless, some providers manage to achieve 0% Downtime over a long period of several months or even years. However, sooner or later, something unforeseeable will happen, leading to a temporary outage.

Be cautious when choosing a web hosting provider. A good SLA (Service Level Agreement) is crucial to address availability concerns.

Often, planned maintenance is not factored into the percentage figures for Uptime. These figures only relate to unforeseen outages. This means that with a web host offering a 99.9% Uptime guarantee, you need to subtract the Downtime of a planned maintenance.

Uptime is a crucial factor when it comes to the success of your own website. Therefore, when choosing the right web host, this criterion should definitely be considered in the decision-making process. To find a good web host, one should not rely solely on Uptime figures but also take into account reviews and feedback from other customers.