It would be nearly impossible to have 100% uptime all the time for most websites. Even big sites experience outages and glitches from time to time. Sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are not immune.
If you look into web hosting most companies like Hostgator will boast a 99.9% uptime guarantee. A few years back it was more like a 99.5% uptime guarantee. I guess tacking on another 0.4% looks a little better, and once one of them did this the others followed.
Percentages always sound better than minutes or hours too. For example, 99.9% uptime (0.1% downtime) would be approximately 1.44 minutes per day of downtime, which doesn’t sound like much. That is also roughly 0.72 hours per month, or 8.8 hours per year of downtime give or take a little. Would you rather see 0.1% or 8.8 hours of downtime per year?
Most people probably wouldn’t even notice small outages. If you are a website owner and you do notice some downtime there is a good possibility that you are not falling within the uptime guarantee.
Now proving that to your host might be another story. I have been using paid hosting for around 15+ years, and during this time I have used a number of different hosts. I will tell you that the quality of service does vary considerably from one to the next.
Some hosts are really good about compensating for downtime. They might give you a month or several months of free hosting to keep you. Others are very quick to blame an outage on a network or other issue not covered in their uptime guarantee. Whether that is truly the case or not you really don’t know. It almost seems like some could be weaseling out of compensating customers, but if they wanted to keep them and avoid bad reviews you would think it would be a small price to pay.
How to Tell How Much Uptime/Downtime Your Website Has?
There are quite a few services out there that you can use to monitor your website’s uptime/downtime. The one I use is Pingdom, which is free to monitor one website. One of the major pluses besides being free is it also allows you to monitor your site in one minute intervals. For the best accuracy one minute checks is about as good as it gets. Five minute checks are acceptable, but the accuracy rate drops a bit. Anything over five minute checking intervals should be avoided.
Do You Know How Much Downtime Your Site Has?
Honestly, I wouldn’t have a clue what kind of downtime my website has if it weren’t for monitoring tools like Pingdom. I would assume that I would have some, but I would have no idea just how much.
I have been hosting with the same company for over 5 years now. My account has been on the same server the entire time. Back in October to December ish 2012 the server started having problems. During this time I did experience noticeable downtime.
Here is a screenshot from December 2012
As you can see the uptime was 96.22% or 3.78% of downtime. December has 31 days so that comes to almost 28 hours of downtime. Yikes!
This went on for at least 3 months and possibly more. I was becoming extremely irritated and annoyed. I complained to my host on numerous occasions. As I said I had been with this company for over 5 years, and they have been great up until this point. I wasn’t ready to give up and bolt on them, but I would eventually if things didn’t improve.
Then, in early January I got an email from my host informing me that they were retiring the server and moving me to a brand new much more powerful one.
I now have 100% uptime for the month of February 2013, which is much more like it.
Screenshot on new server February 2013
If I hadn’t been using Pingdom I really wouldn’t have known about all the downtime. Your host may have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, but they may not be meeting it. I am fine with a little downtime in a given month, but when it gets up around 3-5+ hours then that doesn’t sit well with me.
So if you don’t monitor your website you might think about doing so. You might be surprised by the results. If you do make sure you use a service that has one to five minute checks for the best accuracy.
I am the site owner and administrator of DialMe.com. I write Boonex Dolphin Tutorials on the main part of this website where you will also find tips, webmaster resources and more. Here, on the blog I write about a variety of topics surrounding WordPress, technology, social media/networking, SEO, and webmaster resources.
Boonex Dolphin, Wordpress, Seo, Technology, Web Server and Hosting Specialist.
With some providers it’s really a problem. I guess it is the matter of luck) Thanks for a good post!
Evan recently posted..Cute Animals & Pets WordPress themes
I too was looking to check downtime for my website, but wasn’t aware how to do it. I too use HostGator for my site so I’m sure downtime would be quite less equal to 0.
Aasma recently posted..Quality Web Designers
I didn’t think much about downtime until I read this article. Will definitely try this on some of my blogs to see the results. Hopefully if it’s not down a lot.
Nishadha@diagramming tips recently posted..Create Infographics Online With Creately
Nice info, I used to use a service via email that would email everyday if the site had any issues or not. It would be good if I could re-activitate it. Thanks for the motivation on that.
Lisa recently posted..Blogging On The Go With Fantastic Apps And Tools
I know there are quite a few services out there that can monitor your website. I have been using the free Pingdom service for quite a while. A couple of nice things about it is you can choose to be notified by email when your site is down, and again when it is up, which will give you a pretty good idea of just how long the outage was without having to login to the site. You can also choose to receive monthly reports by email, which is what the screen shots I posted where from. Before using a service like this I really had no idea what kind of uptime/downtime I had.
Although my site is up more then down Ray it’s been down a lot over the past three months. First it was my issue, long story, and then it was their issue.
I know just like any other service that they’re going to have issues with their equipment. I can’t even imagine having a business like hosting and being responsible for hosting everyone’s site information.
I know it’s part of the process but if you find you’re down more then up, it’s time to change.
I’ve used Pingdom too but for other reasons really. I definitely am very aware when my blog is down Ray! I’m on it daily!
~Adrienne
Adrienne recently posted..How Windows Live Writer Can Save You Time
The server my account was on was getting old and wore out I guess. I knew that there were some outages, but I had no idea that it was so much at the time. I try to run a pretty tight shift when it comes to monitoring my sites, but I got to sleep sometime. So the monitoring comes in very handy for keeping an eye on things while I am offline.
Agree, there are hosting companies that conscientious enough to compensate clients for downtime. But there are also hosts who would not take accountability to issues like this.
I have no idea if I have such guarantee. However, my website was up most of the time (except when my provider changed some servers, but the change was at midnight, so it didn’t affect me). The competition is high, there is no point paying for something it doesn’t work, just go to other hosting provider.
I have been with Hostgator for more than a year now. I don’t know whether I had 99.9% uptime but I never experienced any downtime till now. Thanks for introducing Pingdom. I’m definitely going to use it!
Mukesh Dutta recently posted..5 Best Adsense Ready Premium WordPress Themes
Honestly, I’ve never checked these stats of my website, and I also haven’t heard about Pingdome before. Actually, I am a little bit afraid of checking the results, I don’t want to feel disappointed. Btw thanks for sharing the useful information;)
bonooobong recently posted..3D nyomtatott tipográfia – a tervezéstől a 3D nyomtatásig
Pingdom provides really great services. They do have some that are paid, but their free services do everything I need.
I never really gave a thought about it…We use hostgator too for our websites.
This post is an eye opener. With me, I can’t complain much with my web host since it’s free.
Kabie recently posted..Love Indeed!
I am using Google’s page speed plugin to analyze and fix page speed issues whenever possible. But yes if the hosting provider is not so good and my server goes down again and again then I just move away from there.
Keral Patel recently posted..Bandwidth And Its Relationship With Web Server Hosting
I would move to another host if the problem happened frequently. I have been with the same host for so many years that I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. But, if I hadn’t been with them so long it might be another story. Nobody likes downtime though that’s for sure.
Therefore, it is important how you choose your hosts. Definitely you would want the website’s uptime to be 100%. Thanks for the info.
Dan recently posted..Reasons to Hire an SEO Company
Will definitely try this on some of my blogs to see the results. Hopefully if it’s not down a lot.
This is the first time.. am hearing about pingdom.. am gonna try it out… Thanks for sharing this!.. My site experience downtime everyday.. though my hosting notification of paying for compensation is on dead end.. however with this pingdom.. i should have a say.
Thanks again
Good stuff. If databases don’t seem very exciting or sexy, it’s because they are not. When starting projects from scratch, check out other databases that are part of the NoSQL movement to find places to put your data that match the structure of W3C web layout and programming. I use eXist and MarkLogic.
Thanks
Sofiya recently posted..The Next Big Thing In The Internet, Facebook Graph Search