To be honest, knowing your host's uptime guarantee does not matter. Whether it is 99%, 99.99%, or even 100%, it does not matter. This is because hosting companies make up time guarantees to be a great deal, but customers are rarely, if ever, compensated if the companies break these guarantees.
But truth be said, when used in a marketing campaign, uptime guarantees are critical and will even get people to buy hosting. However, no kind of guarantee will prevent your site from going offline in the event of a glitch.
How Much Downtime is Within Acceptable Range?
Let us begin by taking a closer look at how much time these percentages represent. A month with 30 days will have 43,200 minutes in it (60 minutes x 24 hours x 30 days). Taking a look at some of the most common uptime guarantees, we can have an idea of how long a site would be down before the guarantee begins.
- 99% uptime guarantee allows up to 432 minutes of downtime (which is more than 7 hours) each month.
- 99.9% uptime guarantee allows your website to be offline for about 45 minutes. Many hosts can change hardware in less than 30 minutes, thus allowing at least one failure or upgrade every month. This is the uptime offered by many leading web hosting companies like Hostgator, GoDaddy, and more.
- An uptime guarantee of 99.99% allows for a downtime of less than 5 minutes every month. As CDN and cloud hosting gain more popularity, it is becoming more common to get guarantees of 99.99% and 100%. It is, however, still difficult to find hosts who offer them.
( Furthermore, some host providers measure downtime it quarters or yearly. This means that an extended period of downtime can be comfortably compensated for by good service in months that follow.)
But the big question is, how much downtime can you put up with? Ideally None. However, your hosting provider could be giving themselves much more margin than you would have expected.
How Much Will You Be Compensated?
Getting compensation for downtime could really be difficult. The hosting company will almost never refund what you pay for their service in cash. You might find out that you will only be covered for the time your website was actually offline. In the event you are refunded, this amount will most probably be loaded to your account as credit, and many times it will be too little to even cover a month's worth of hosting.
If you ever accumulate enough money to make seeking a refund worth, your website and business would be undoubtedly suffering from all the downtime and poor service that you tolerated.
Should You Care About Uptime Guarantees?
This article has shown that uptime guarantees offered by web hosting companies are usually very varied. You could rely on some while others are just not worth relying on. But no uptime guarantee will protect your site from being offline, or compensate you for lost business because your site was down.
Uptime guarantees are just used by web hosting companies to make their services look better but in most cases, they are offering a false sense of security to users.
If you want a good host, it is better to look at ratings and reviews of other users, and not the uptime guarantee offered.
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