What Exactly is Web Hosting Uptime
When choosing a company to host your website, one of the more important features to look out for besides from storage space and bandwidth is the website uptime. Most companies promote their web hosting uptime which in part determines how well their service is.
Most web hosting companies strive for a 99.9% uptime which typically means that there's less then 2 minutes of downtime during any given day to a site. Uptime is just as important to the hosting company as it is to the customer because if a website is down for a prolonged period, it could damage the reputation to both parties involved.
Sometimes unforeseen factors can be attributed as the reason for unavoidable downtimes, but many companies strive to prevent this.
Downtime is typically classified in three ways;
Planned downtime: Normally whenever a server update or upgrade is involved.
Semi-planned downtime: Often caused when a security flaw or breach occurs and a patch must be put into place.
Unplanned-downtime: The worst of all three, sometimes cause by an overloaded server, software/hardware malfunction, or malicious software such as a virus.
Web hosting uptime is often monitored and maintained in a few ways. The large web hosting companies often have an entire department dedicated to monitoring their servers and a loss in uptime is often prevented by having secondary server(s) to fall back on incase the primary server(s) goes down. For planned single server changes in larger companies, this method is more practical to that of smaller web host companies to whom it is more impractical due to costs, especially when multiple servers are involved.
For the consumer, researching the uptime of a web host can often be the deciding point between purchasing one of their packages or not. There are various websites that track a companies uptime and provide users with reviews based on the company. Another place to find this information is on forums either provided on the web hosts website or on web hosting review forums.
Something to consider is that it's impossible to find a web hosting company with a 100% uptime guarantee, it's simply not practical. If your web site does experience downtime, you can contact their technical or customer service department to find out how long they expect the downtime to be and when your site will be back up and running. If your site experiences consistent downtime, you may need to consider switching hosts.
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