How Much The Website Uptime Is Important ?

There are a number of metrics around hosting websites. One of them is "availability".

What this is about and how important this value is, you will learn in the following.

What is the hosting availability?

Hosting providers offer space on a server (or even entire servers), which are then available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on the Internet. So at least in the ideal case.

In reality, however, it can occasionally come to temporary failures, through which your own website for short or longer time online is not available.

This is of course not good, because not only potential visitors are lost, but also in case of an accumulation of failures Google can also draw consequences in the form of lower rankings.

Therefore, it is important that the chosen hosting provider can guarantee high availability.

What is a high availability?

Is 99% a high availability value? That sounds like that for now. However, an availability of 99% for the whole year means a downtime (unavailability) of at least 3.65 days.

With 99.9% availability, there are only a maximum of 8.76 hours per year, which is the own website offline.

There can be many reasons for a downtime. This can lead to technical defects in the server, which can be absorbed by backup or cluster systems, however, in most cases. Also power failure, fire and other reasons can be responsible.

The higher the availability that a hosting provider guarantees, the more effort has to be made by the host to keep it in practice.

Selection of the hosting provider

When selecting a host, guaranteed availability should definitely be a factor.

However, the availability value that is aimed at depends greatly on the project. At a niche website, it may even be enough to have an availability of 99%.

On the other hand, anyone who offers a paid premium service that is used by users around the clock usually needs more than 99.9%.

For good hosting providers the guaranteed availability is indicated. In addition, one usually has the choice there to choose a more expensive tariff with a higher availability or add as an option.

However, not only the availability itself ensures the accessibility of your own website. If you're using a cheap hosting plan, you might not have any server outages, but the poor performance of the webspace can still make the site slow or sometimes unreachable.

Measure availability

Some hosting providers indicate the real availability in the account statistics.

To be on the safe side, you can use e.g. a tool like Pingdom.com. This tool checks regularly if a website is available and keeps statistics about it.

In this way you can check the information provided by the host.

My experiences

I used to use a cheap webspace for my blogs, but at some point I noticed more and more downtimes.

That's why I switched to Liquidweb, where I've had my own server for quite some time.

There is 99.9% availability guaranteed, which is exceeded in my experience in practice even more.

But also providers like Siteground or WPengine offer a high availability.