Website Hosting Reviews

Note: The web hosts listed in Website Hosting Reviews all have reputations for having excellent uptime track records.  This article is meant to help you avoid web hosts that don't have stellar records.  

As applied to web hosting:

Uptime refers to the amount of time your website WILL be available.

Downtime refers to the amount of time your website WILL NOT be available.

Almost all web hosting providers display their uptime in the form of a guarantee. This uptime guarantee is suppose to reassure you that their hosting service is dependable. Unfortunately, this is not always the case as most uptime guarantees are no more than just marketing hype and misleading promises.

With that said, when selecting a web hosting provider, the uptime guarantee is still something you don’t want to overlook. After all, time is money - and if your website is down, it’s costing you money! Start to think about downtime as lost sales, unsuccessful newsletter sign-ups, missed promotional opportunities or even your online reputation. In fact, website downtime could end up costing you much more than the monthly cost of the web hosting.

The Industry Average

An uptime guarantee of 99.9% is the industry average. In a 30-day month, a 99.9% uptime guarantee allows for a maximum of 43 minutes and 12 seconds of downtime per month.

Almost all web hosting providers state their uptime guarantee on a month-by-month basis. Although rare, a few will state their uptime guarantee on a yearly basis. Obviously, this benefits them much more than it benefits you. In order to receive any compensation for their poor service, you would have to stay with them for at least a year. This could expose your website to more downtime, which in turn, could cost you more money.

To sum it up, if a web hosting provider you’re considering states their uptime guarantee on a yearly basis - you should probably consider using another provider.

Types of Downtime

Even with an experienced web hosting provider, some downtime is unavoidable. Eventually, all servers and network infrastructure require some kind of software upgrade or hardware replacement that will require downtime.

The three types of downtime you may experience include:

1. Planned Downtime – This type of downtime usually involves server upgrades, network upgrades, software upgrades or possibly new software installations. Most web hosting providers will notify you in advance when performing this type of maintenance. In an effort to reduce website downtime, most will complete this type of maintenance late at night when the majority of websites receive the least amount of traffic.
2. Semi-Planned Downtime – This type of downtime usually involves the discovery of a serious software bug or security breach that involves patching the installed software. Because these problems require immediate attention, you’ll receive very little (if any) advance notice of possible downtime.
3. Unplanned Downtime – This is the worst type of downtime and is the result of an overloaded server, unstable or corrupted software, hardware failure, network problems and even the weather. With this type of downtime, you will receive no advance notice.

Generally, any downtime you experience because of planned or semi-planned downtime will not count toward the uptime guarantee. In addition, some web hosting providers state in their TOS (terms of service) that any downtime caused by earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, DDOS attacks, and any event that’s out of their control will not count toward the uptime guarantee.

Network Uptime, Server Uptime or Both

Some web hosting providers state their uptime guarantee as applying to their network, some to the server, and some apply it to both the server and the network. To examine how these differences affect you, let’s look at the following two examples.

1. Server Uptime – Your web host states their uptime guarantee as applying to the server. In this example, the server that your website is located on is working fine. Unfortunately, their network is down and your website isn’t reachable from the Internet. Even though your website is unavailable, technically the uptime guarantee does not apply because the server that your website is on is still up and running.
2. Network Uptime – This time your host states their uptime guarantee as applying to their network. In this example, their network is working properly but the server your website is on has developed a bad hard drive. Again, even though your website is unavailable, the uptime guarantee does not apply because their network is up and running.

Obviously, the best solution for you would be to find a web host that applies their uptime guarantee to both the server and the network. Unfortunately, most providers state their uptime guarantee as applying to their network and not the server. Generally, this network uptime policy applies to all types of hosting such as shared hosting, VPS (virtual private servers) and dedicated servers (both self-managed and managed).

Uptime Guarantee Compensation

The amount of compensation you’ll receive for downtime varies widely between hosting providers. Some will only compensate you a messily 5% of your monthly hosting fee no matter how long your website is unavailable. Some will compensate you a maximum of 50% of your monthly hosting fee, and still others will compensate you the total monthly hosting fee.

For any downtime event, the compensation you’ll receive is limited to the monthly amount you pay for hosting. The compensation will usually be in the form of a credit on your account, and will used on your next month’s hosting bill.

Because of the vast range of compensation between hosting providers - it’s important to read the fine print in their TOS (terms of service) or SLA (service level agreement) policies. If you can’t find the amount of compensation you’ll receive for downtime in these policies, ask their customer service representatives.

Proving Downtime

When it comes to proving downtime, you are at the mercy of the hosting provider. Every provider handles this in a different way, but most will require you to contact them stating you’ve experienced downtime. Typically, you’ll have to use their ticket-based help desk to make the request.

In a worst-case situation, the web hosting provider will start measuring downtime from the time you submit the support ticket to the time they close the ticket.

For example, your website is unavailable for 2 hours before you discover it’s down. You submit a trouble ticket to the provider, and they fix the problem within 15 minutes. Even though your website was down for 2 hours and 15 minutes, they only consider it down for 15 minutes.

And just so you know, most hosting providers will not accept downtime proof from a third party uptime monitoring service. This is because of all the variables that come into play (such as the quality of the monitoring service, their network capacity/transit availability, etc.). Instead, they utilize their own in-house monitoring service and the reports produced by the server’s operating system and web server software.

What if you know you experienced downtime, and the host says you didn’t? Basically, too bad. The hosting provider has the final decision - and if they determine that your website wasn’t down, you won’t receive any compensation.

Conclusion

Even though most uptime guarantees are just marketing hype - and most web hosting providers TOS (terms of service) and SLA’s (service level agreement) make it just about  impossible for you to collect on the uptime guarantee - it still offers some usefulness when selecting a web host.

The best advice we can give - read the fine print in the hosting providers TOS (terms of service) and/or SLA (service level agreement). This way you’ll know in advance what their uptime guarantee policies are before a problem develops. Armed with this information, you’ll be able to decide if you feel comfortable working with a web hosting provider based on your individual requirements.

The web hosts listed in Website Hosting Reviews all have reputations for having excellent uptime track records.

Web Hosting Uptime Guarantees Exposed