Uptime
Uptime is the proportion of time a website, app or system is available and working for its users, usually quoted as a percentage over a month or a year.
Uptime is the share of time your website or app is available and working. It is usually quoted as a percentage over a month or a year, and the small differences between the numbers are bigger than they look.
What the percentages mean in hours
Take a 30-day month of 43,200 minutes. An uptime of 99% allows about 7 hours of downtime. A figure of 99.9% allows about 43 minutes, and 99.99% allows about 4 minutes. Over a full year, 99.9% still permits nearly 9 hours of outage. Each extra nine costs noticeably more to deliver, because it needs backup servers and round-the-clock monitoring, so decide which level your business really needs.
When the downtime happens matters more
Forty minutes down at 4 a.m. costs nothing; forty minutes at Sunday dinner time costs orders and goodwill. Check what the figure measures, too. A homepage can be up while payments are failing, and many contracts exclude planned maintenance, so read the exceptions as carefully as the headline number. Common causes of outages are hosting faults, bugs in your own software, a payment gateway having a bad hour and an expired SSL certificate or domain.
An example: a cloud kitchen in Chennai
Say a cloud kitchen runs its own ordering website to avoid paying commission to delivery apps. At 8 p.m. on a Saturday the site slows to a crawl and then goes down for forty minutes. Hungry customers do not wait; they open a delivery app instead, and some may not come back. For this business a dependable host, monitoring that alerts a person within minutes and a plan for the busy evening hours are worth real money. See software for restaurants and cloud kitchens and our guide to online ordering for restaurants.
How we approach hosting
VS Tech Builders deploys projects on Vercel, AWS, GCP or Hostinger, chosen by what the project needs and what an outage would cost you. No honest provider promises that nothing will ever go down, so ask any provider, us included, what is committed in writing and what happens when it is missed. A written service level agreement is where that answer belongs, and backup and disaster recovery covers how quickly you get back up.
Common questions
What uptime should a small business expect from hosting?
A figure of 99.9% is common in hosting offers, which allows roughly 43 minutes of downtime a month. That is adequate for a brochure website or a catalogue. A business that takes orders or bookings round the clock should also ask about monitoring, backups and response time, since a promise on paper matters less than how quickly someone acts when the site goes down.
How can I check my website's uptime?
Use a free or paid monitoring service that requests your site every minute or so and alerts you by email or SMS when it fails. It also keeps a history, so you can see how long each outage lasted. Monitor the pages that earn money, such as checkout or booking, and not only the homepage. Review the report monthly.
Read more
Tell us what you need. Get a fixed quote.
Describe your business and the problem in a few lines. We reply within one business day with an honest recommendation, a scope and a fixed price.