How Is Hosting Uptime Calculated?

Jun 07, 2023

The proportion of time that your website is accessible to visitors is measured by the hosting uptime indicator. Most web hosting companies display it as a percentage even though you may compute it in seconds, minutes, hours, or days. The simplest calculation is to divide the time the hosting server has available by the desired time frame. The following is a general formula to get the percentage hosting uptime:

Hosting Uptime = (Total Time / Time the hosting server is available) x 100

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What Affects Uptime for Hosting? 

The uptime of your website can be impacted by a number of factors, such as:

1. Server equipment

A server may slow down or crash if it receives too many requests and not enough resources to handle them all at once. To keep a website available, picking a host with dependable servers and enough processing power is crucial. Kinsta, for instance, provides customers with services using Google Cloud infrastructure. The outstanding reliability of cloud infrastructure is made possible through redundancy in various areas. In the event of a failure, an alternative is effortlessly integrated.

2. Programs/Software

Software programs can have a big impact on how accessible a website is. When handling numerous simultaneous connections, some people are more vulnerable than others. Some may be more susceptible to malicious activity due to security weaknesses that cause downtime.
Many people frequently overlook the requirement to check application versions after hosting migrations. Version mismatches between the new and old hosts could cause a website outage.

3. Configurations of the server

Web servers with poor configurations (or incorrect configurations) may act erratically. These accumulate over time and, in certain circumstances, can result in downtime. The issue with server setups is how differently different web hosting plan types are handled. For instance, the former is typically user-configured when comparing VPS versus shared hosting. The lack of technical expertise among many website owners makes server configuration errors more likely.

4. Importance of Uptime

Unavailable website' is a common oversimplification of hosting uptime. However, website proprietors should carefully evaluate the potential repercussions.
Hosting uptime can have a variety of effects on your company, staff, or clients. The last thing you want as a website owner is for your customers to feel alienated from the things that keep them coming back. Possible repercussions of hosting outages include;

Loss of Potential Customers or Sales

If your website is down, you could lose out on prospective leads or sales. Consider the situation of an online store that gets 1,000 different visitors every hour. This website might lose 5% of those visitors if its hosting uptime drops by that amount. That equals 1,120 lost sales opportunities every day!
This estimate is obviously simplified, but the overall concept is that any downtime in the hosting environment would probably have some direct cost consequences for you.

Possibility of Reputational Harm

Reputational factors for your website include uptime. If customers can't use what they need from you at any given time because the website is broken, negative opinions may develop.
Through forums, media channels, and word-of-mouth, this damaging brand influence can spread swiftly. Furthermore, reputation is much simpler to lose than to rebuild.
Bitcatcha tracks the long-term uptime performance for each web host we analyze due to the importance of uptime to a website or business. In order to check reliability on a minute-by-minute basis, we deploy Uptime Robot and maintain test websites on those service providers.

Tips To Increase Uptime for Hosting

It's crucial to take action to guarantee the highest potential uptime once your site is operational. Here are a few useful pointers:

1. Pick a Trustworthy Web Server

Making sure you're using a reputable web host is the most important factor in uptime assurance. The quality of services offered by different service providers varies. As an illustration, a top-notch hosting company like Dream Host offers a 100% uptime guarantee. They guarantee you that if your website goes down, it won't be due to a problem with their hosting infrastructure.

2. Boost Website Safety

A lot of websites go offline because of nefarious activity. While it's hard to totally protect against these, you can reduce risk by enhancing the security of your website. Start by frequently updating your plugins and staying up to date on any emerging vulnerabilities in your online applications.

 

3. Turn on Caching

Your website will perform more effectively and handle visitor load better with the aid of caching. Since the website can still deliver some pages, caches can also assist with service interruptions. This "backup" enhances your standing with users and search engines who prioritize quick load times and a consistent user experience.

4. Examine Superior Hosting Strategies

If you presently use shared hosting, think about switching to a VPS hosting plan. Because there are fewer users on each server and more dedicated resources with VPS plans, the reliability is substantially higher. Despite being inexpensive, shared hosting is typically overcrowded by many web hosts.

5. Make Use of a Network of Content Delivery.

Consider implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) if you want to increase reliability even more. These services can be useful in a variety of ways, such as speeding up load times, enhancing security, or even offering free SSL features (free SSL features are a huge plus because SSL certificate pricing can vary substantially).
Although there are other CDNs available, the majority of web hosts can function just fine with Cloudflare's free CDN service. This means that, with a little effort, you may increase hosting uptime for practically no cost.

6. Recognizing Uptime Promises

Due to the shortcomings of uptime assurances, we have discussed maximizing uptime in great detail. The majority of uptime promises look excellent on paper. Customers of the web host are guaranteed X% uptime. If it violates that stipulation, it will provide compensation. However, there are two significant limitations to this "guarantee." Most web hosts only offer hosting credits as compensation to consumers. The majority of web hosts charge based on the cost of your hosting package.

A simple method is to multiply downtime as a percentage by the monthly cost of your site hosting. For instance, If there is a 5% website downtime and your web hosting plan costs $3 per month, you will receive 15 cents in compensation.

Some website hosts will multiply fees, but most won't give you anything more than what your web hosting package is worth. You must read the Service Level Agreement (SLA) of your web server to learn your unique uptime guarantee. Although many web hosts prefer to brag about their uptime guarantees, the benefits are far from sufficient to make up for the harm to your reputation, the potential loss of revenue, and other negative consequences of a service outage.