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100% Uptime Guarantee Look, no shared web host can guarantee 100% uptime. In fact, VPS, Dedicated, and Cloud hosts can't guarantee 100% uptime for your web site either. I'm sure you've heard about the recent Amazon cloud hosting downtime - and they were supposed to provide some of the most reliable hosting out there. Why can't 100% Up Time Really Be Guaranteed? Uptime is basically the amount of time in which your hosting service remains active, and directly determines how long your site stays online. 100% means a website is up and running all the time. Every single second of time, you're site needs to be available to meet the 100% guarantee. That's just not realistic. Web servers need to be maintained. Computer servers require administration and maintenance work every once in a while. Plus, just like your home computer, a web server needs to be reset from time to time. In addition, sometimes bad, crazy outlier things happen that just can't be avoided unless a web host was to build in so much redundancy that costs would sky-rocket (see shit happens in web hosting). So as much as web hosts would like to market 100% uptime guarantee, they can't. Or, they say 100% UpTime Guarantee, but include a huge asterisk with legal language. Register.com markets their hosting with 100% uptime guarantee: "We're so confident in out uptime reliability, we guarantee it." But when you dig a little further, you find out what this legally means: "If your site goes down, we're the only provider that will credit your account for downtime." Does this mean Register.com will credit you for lost sales or advertising dollars? Nope, just the cost of the web hosting. So, lets say your site was down for an hour for unplanned outages (because if it's "planned" downtime, it doesn't count as downtime according to their T&C's). You'd get credited back literally pennies (cost of hosting per month/720 hours in a month). Don't get us wrong, we still like Register.com web hosting - especially if you want great customer service and a dedicated IP address for your website. 
99.9% Uptime Guarantee Instead a lot of hosts advertise 99.9% uptime. The definition of 99.9% uptime varies depending on each individual hosting provider, and information pertaining uptime guarantees can usually be found in fine print of a hosting contract (located on the sales page for the service). In some cases, 99.9% uptime can mean that service is guaranteed to be active for 99.9% of each month, while in other cases it may mean 99.9% of each year. Most people don’t realize that the additional .9% is actually very important, as it can mean the difference of several days per year. What to Do If Your Web Host is Not Reliable If your website is down a lot, or really slow. Call your web host. Get someone on the line that knows what they're talking about. Ask them why your website is slow, and what they can do to fix it. If you don't get a good answer, or if they promise to fix the issue but it continues, then change web hosts. Make sure you buy hosting from a reliable provider. We think the shared, cheap web hosts listed in our website hosting reviews fit this description. Even a relatively short amount of website downtime can cost you money. 100% Uptime Guarantee| What Does 99.9% Web Site Hosting Up Time Mean?
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