Monday, March 19, 2007

Check Your Web Host’s Uptime

Uptime! Well, undoubtedly, it is one of the most important aspects of any web hosting deal. People all over the world yen for that magic 99.99% website uptime. Believe it or not, it is a real challenge for the web hosting service providers to provide you with 99.99% website uptime. And it’s quite drolly that every other web hosting service provider claims to provide you with a 99.99% uptime.

Therefore, it is your responsibility to correctly gauge whether or not your web hosting service provider can actually offer the magical uptime it promises. But before that, you need to understand what exactly does 99.99% website uptime mean. It will help you put things into perspective.

In simple words, 99.99% website uptime means that the total downtime for your website during a month does not exceed 40 minutes. Now, you can easily gauge the downtime for a day.
This is not all. Another aspect that you must take into account is the usual time of the day when the downtime occurs. You would not mind a downtime at the dozing business hours. However, if the downtime takes place at the peak business hours, it will rile you a lot. And in such a case, even the 99.99% uptime will not be able to please you, and rightly so!

The web hosting service providers that are actually able to provide 99.99% website uptime keep the monitoring intervals really short. Monitoring intervals refer to the time periods when the web hosting service provider checks the server to ensure that everything is working fine.

Ideally, for a web hosting service provider that claims to provide you with 99.9% uptime, the monitoring interval for each day should not exceed five minutes. And if it does, there is every reason for you to believe that your web hosting service provider is not giving you the promised 99.99% uptime.

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