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Written by Larry Dearing
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Saturday, 19 December 2009 16:43 |
Web Hosting is very dependable these days, right? After all they have those great high percentages of uptime full of "nine". Here is a little reality check on what to expect from the uptime quotes of various webhosts. High uptimes may seem like it means servers or sites will almost never go down but the truth may be surprising.
Industry standards are to measure downtimes over a month of service, not since the establishment of your web hosting account. This means the "timer" starts over each month. There may be others doing something different, but again, these are industry standards. So, for each month, look at the amount of downtime your host could have and still be within quoted range.
Minutes per month of downtime is a percentage of total minutes based on following calculation for a 30 day month:
(60 minute x 24hours)30 days = 43,200 total minutes per 30 day month
For brevity only the most common percentages quoted by web host providers are calculated.
99.99 = 4.32 minutes of downtime per month
99.98 = 8.64 minutes
99.9 = 43.2 minutes
99.8 = 1.44 hours
99.7 = 2.16 hours
99.6 = 2.88 hours
99.5 = 3.6 hours
99.00 = 7.2 hours
98.00 = 14.4 hours
97.00 = 21.6 hours
Keep in mind, this only involves time when their services are not available due to their fault. It does not include downtime due to you having trouble with something like installing a script or updating something that doesn't work out and you have to place a support request. It also would not include something like major internet wide attacks on DNS servers which has occurred a few times in the last couple years or a direct DOS (Denial of Service) attack on the host's server or data center.
As you can see, this allows a lot of "wiggle" room for providers. They know web servers must occassionaly be rebooted or taken down for a quick hardware repair. The standards that most good web hosts attempt to achieve and feel comfortable quoting is 99.9% uptime and will almost always meet it. These web hosts generally will give a credit for the month of service in which the quoted down time was experienced. |
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