← Back to all articles

Website Hosting Uptime Guarantees: Are They Real?

When you purchase hosting services for your website, you expect your provider to ensure your website is up and running as often as possible. In fact, if you had your way, your website would never go down. After all, your visitors’ experience is important to your reputation and brand. As such, some hosts have started offering uptime guarantees of up to 100%, but is that really possible? Technology isn’t always reliable, so can hosts really make the claim that your website will never go down? Let’s find out.

What is Uptime?

Before we dive into the truthfulness of uptime guarantees, let’s take a moment to explain what uptime actually is. Uptime is defined as the percentage of time a web host is available, meaning the websites on its servers are accessible to visitors. For instance, if your web host has an average uptime of 99%, it would mean that your website is available 99% of the time, but is unavailable for that 1%. This downtime might be due to scheduled maintenance, power failure, updates, or other unforeseen events.

What Kind of Guarantee Does a Host Have?

If a host offers an uptime guarantee, it will usually be advertised in its marketing materials, but if it’s not a very good uptime guarantee, it might be buried or not available without directly asking the company what their guarantee is. Before you sign up for any host, ask them what, if any, uptime guarantee they have and whether or not they reimburse you for any downtime you experience that doesn’t meet that guarantee. If there is no guarantee, look for a different provider.

Is 100% Uptime a Possibility?

You probably aren’t going to find many, if any, hosts that offer a 100% uptime guarantee. This is because they can’t predict some events like power failures, cyber attacks, and other unforeseen situations that can lead to downtime. Offering a 100% uptime guarantee only guarantees that the host will eventually lose money.

By the way, 99.99% is not the same as 100%. When it comes to website uptime, rounding up is not an option. Those one-hundreths of a percent matter, and there’s a big difference between a 99.99% uptime rate and a 99.90% uptime rate. In fact, if you go with a host with an uptime lower than 99.90%, you’re going to be disappointed and so will your visitors.

What is a Reasonable Uptime Guarantee?

Some web hosts offer a 99.99% uptime guarantee, which means they promise your website won’t be down for more than five minutes in a year’s time. That may seem like not a lot of downtime, but if you’re running a major e-commerce website, those five minutes could translate into millions of dollars of lost revenue. Most websites don’t need this type of guarantee because five minutes of downtime is not going to make or break them.

Strive for a host with a 99.90% uptime guarantee because this means your website won’t be down for more than 0.1% of the time in any given month. That’s usually acceptable for most websites and if it goes beyond that, you’ll get compensated for the lost time. 

Conclusion

Web hosts can’t guarantee 100% uptime, but they can come close. Uptime should definitely be a factor in your decision on which host to use, and you should get as close to a 100% uptime guarantee as possible, but most visitors understand if your website is down infrequently, so don’t worry too much about a few hundredths of a percentage point here and there.





person using megaphone