A stated percentage translates into a specific allowance of downtime, and the guarantee behind it usually pays a hosting credit rather than compensating for lost business. Monitoring your own site is worth more than the number in the sales page.

What the percentages permit

The figures are marketed as reassurance and they are better read as an allowance.

Stated uptimePermitted downtime per yearPer month
99%About three and a half daysAbout seven hours
99.9%About nine hoursAbout forty-three minutes
99.99%About fifty-three minutesAbout four minutes
99.999%About five minutesAbout twenty-six seconds

Three nines, which is the common small-business offering, permits three quarters of an hour of downtime a month. That is fine at three in the morning and expensive during the fortnight your season starts.

The figure says nothing about when the downtime falls, which is the part that actually matters.

What the guarantee actually pays

The part worth reading before relying on it.

Most hosting guarantees pay a credit against your hosting fee, proportional to the outage. On a plan costing a modest amount monthly, an hour of downtime is worth a fraction of a dollar.

It does not compensate you for lost enquiries, and no small business hosting arrangement does. The guarantee is a statement of intent rather than insurance.

Most also require you to notice the outage, document it, and claim within a stated period. A credit nobody claims is not a cost to the host, which is part of why the guarantee is offered.

What is excluded

Consistently, and the exclusions cover a good share of real outages.

That last exclusion is worth noting. Uptime measures whether the server responded, not whether anybody could use the site, and the more common failure for a small business is a site that is technically available and unusably slow.

Monitor it yourself

The practical response, and it costs nothing.

An external monitoring service checks your site at intervals from outside your network and alerts you when it stops responding. Free tiers are adequate for a small business.

Two reasons this matters more than the guarantee. It tells you about an outage before a customer does, which is the difference between a short problem and a day of lost enquiries. And it produces your own record, which is what you need if you ever want to hold the host to anything or decide to leave.

Worth monitoring: the homepage, one service page, and if you have one, the checkout or booking page, since those can fail independently of the site being up.

The outages that are not the host

A useful diagnostic distinction, because the response differs.

The domain. An expired registration or a DNS misconfiguration takes the site off entirely and has nothing to do with the server.

The certificate. An expired certificate produces a browser warning that stops most visitors, and the site itself is running perfectly.

Your own site. A failed update or a plugin conflict produces an error page from a server that is working.

All three are counted as your problem in the agreement and all three look identical to a customer. Knowing which you have determines who to contact.

When uptime genuinely matters

Being proportionate, since a small business does not need enterprise arrangements.

For a brochure site, an occasional short outage costs very little. For a store, a booking system, or a business whose enquiries arrive in concentrated seasonal bursts, it costs more and the hosting decision should reflect that.

The honest position is that most small businesses are better served by a host with responsive support than by one advertising an extra nine, because what determines the length of an outage is how quickly somebody addresses it.

The question to ask a host

Not what their uptime figure is, since everybody quotes a similar one.

Ask what their support hours actually are, how to reach somebody urgently outside them, what their recent incident history looks like, and whether they publish a status page.

A host with a public status page and an honest incident record is telling you more than a number on a sales page, and knowing how to reach them quickly is what matters when something breaks, as covered in preparing hosting for a spike.

Frequently asked questions

What does 99.9% uptime actually permit?

About forty-three minutes of downtime a month, or nine hours a year. The figure says nothing about when that downtime falls, which is what matters.

What does an uptime guarantee pay?

Usually a credit against your hosting fee proportional to the outage, which on a small plan is a fraction of a dollar. It does not compensate for lost enquiries.

What is excluded from uptime guarantees?

Scheduled maintenance, anything caused by your own site, attacks in many agreements, problems with your domain or certificate, and slowness, since a slow site is technically up.

Should I monitor the site myself?

Yes. External monitoring with a free tier tells you about an outage before a customer does, and produces your own record if you ever want to hold the host to anything.

What outages are not the host's fault?

An expired domain or DNS error, an expired certificate producing a browser warning, and your own site failing after an update. All three look identical to a customer.

What should I ask a host instead of their uptime figure?

Their actual support hours, how to reach somebody urgently outside them, their recent incident history, and whether they publish a status page.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

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