We had a look at what kind of uptime guarantees web hosting companies are offering. Especially, how bad they can get. In doing this, we found several examples of web hosting companies that only offer a 95% uptime guarantee. Numbers like that don’t exactly inspire confidence. Why? Have a look below.
With 95% uptime, how much downtime would that remaining 5% make in a 31-day month? The answer is: 37 hours and 12 minutes. That is more than a day and a half that your site would be unavailable! And over the course of a year? A whopping 18 days and 6 hours of downtime.
Don’t those web hosting companies have more trust in their own service than that?
The same could be said, though perhaps to a lesser extent, of web hosting companies offering a 98% uptime guarantee and similar. 98% uptime is the equivalent of 14 hours and 52 minutes of downtime per month, and more than 7 days and 7 hours per year.
Even a 99% uptime guarantee is really far from stellar. That would allow for 7 hours and 26 minutes of downtime per month, and more than 3 days and 15 hours per year. Yet there are lots of hosting companies that only offer a 99% uptime guarantee.
On top of this you should be aware that the uptime guarantee will usually exclude any downtime that happens due to planned maintenance and sometimes other factors as well.
The moral of the story is: If you don’t trust yourself to deliver better uptime than 95%, perhaps you shouldn’t be providing hosting at all…?
