Almost every hosting plan advertises an uptime figure, such as 99.9%. It sounds close to perfect, but it helps to know what it means in practice.
Uptime in real time
Uptime is the share of time your website is reachable. Converted into downtime, the common figures look like this:
- 99% allows roughly 7 hours of downtime a month.
- 99.9% allows roughly 43 minutes a month.
- 99.99% allows roughly 4 minutes a month.
For an online store or a lead-generating website, the difference between these levels can mean lost orders and missed enquiries.
What causes downtime?
- Hardware or network failures at the data centre.
- Traffic spikes that overload a small hosting plan.
- Faulty plugin or theme updates.
- Expired domains or SSL certificates.
- Malware or attacks.
How to keep your site online
- Choose hosting sized for your traffic, and upgrade before you hit the limits.
- Use uptime monitoring so you are alerted the moment the site goes down.
- Test major updates on a staging copy first.
- Keep automatic backups so you can restore quickly.
- Turn on auto-renewal for your domain and SSL certificate.
Support matters as much as the percentage
When something goes wrong, what counts is how quickly someone helps you. Local support that answers the phone can save hours compared with waiting on a ticket queue.
Explore our hosting plans, all backed by local support, or talk to us about moving your site.