Imagine that you have good number of sponsors and high traffic for your blog. They visited your site and found your site inaccessible, what would they imagine about your site. You would lose all traffic and business in that time. A serious blogger needs to select reliable web host, providing state of art services to their clients. We consider many factors while selecting the web host. One important factor that we may ignore or pay less attention to it, is the web server up time. Today in this article we are going to unveil the reality of server up time, network uptime and its myth.
What is Server Uptime:-
Server uptime is the time throughout the month, when server is able to process the all traffic request. If you are looking for some site and it is not responding, it means web server is partially down or totally. Providing 100% uptime is almost difficult but not possible. One has to hire highly skilled staff and deploy good infrastructure.
Web Hosts’ Claim- A Hidden Reality:-
Before finalizing the webhost selection, please do inquire about their uptime. Industry standards uptime is 99.99% and some are providing even 100% uptime. Below this standard, don’t select the web host. Server maintenance and update is such a factor which can’t be avoided and this is the case with every web host. But with proper planning and management, web host can curtail this maintenance time.
If we calculate the industry standard, it means that;
Total number of minutes in a month x (100-uptime%)/100
= (30days x 24hours) x 60min x (100-99.9)/100
= 43200 x (0.1)/100
= 43.2 minutes (max downtime).
What about figures below than industry standard like 99% and 98.5% up time? You would have unbearable loss in terms of business and traffic. Can you afford this much down time? Answer is no. Do remember that high speed network and stable server time is also considered in Google Page Rank.
Some webhost play dirty game and use jugglery of words. They make confuse their customers and claim in their SLA (Service level agreement) that they are guaranteeing 100% network up time. Don’t confuse the “Server Uptime” and “Network Uptime” terminologies.
Network uptime means that their network (Lan, Wan) will up all time despite the fact that one of their server in network is down. Because they committed for network up time not the server uptime. So when you talk to them they will reply you with the reality that they haven’t committed the server uptime.
While Server Uptime means that every server including your one would remain up for their committed time. This is more important than network uptime. So always look for Server Uptime.
Some host even clarifies the situation that network maintenance will be included in this down time or they will take some extra time for this issue.
Before selecting any host for your blog or website do check their server uptime from WebHostingStuff monitored for at least six months and then analyze their previous trend towards their commitment. If they have occasional down time which may occur due to reboot, security patch or some update, and consistent up time then it’s ok and go with them.
But if webhost has frequent downtime for different intervals during previous six months, they might have old and faulty hardware. Stay away from them or you will lose your investment plus hard earned traffic.
Link:- WebHostingstuff
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Thats a very nice article in plain simple language.
I agree that its extremely essential to have a reliable host with excellent uptime. I haven’t had any issues with my host so far, I’ve just noticed that the site was not available on one occasion till date.
Selurus, selection of webhost is a critical decision, itlet you to work with peace of mind. Onw or two downtime for short time interval is normal. After all hardware and software filure is out of control. Meanwhile you use freewebmonitoring[dot]com to monitor your website for free and have alarms.
I want to check my server up time in %
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