The Uptime Tiers, Translated to Real Time
99.0% allows 7.3 hours of downtime per month — unacceptable for business sites. 99.9% allows 43.8 minutes monthly. 99.95% allows 21.9 minutes. 99.99% allows just 4.4 minutes. 99.999% (the “five nines”) allows 26 seconds.
Those gaps compound: a store converting $500/hour loses $350 monthly at 99.9% versus $37 at 99.99%.
How Hosts Measure (and Massage) Uptime
Most hosts measure per-month, excluding “scheduled maintenance” — a loophole that lets some providers hide real outages. Others measure server ping (machine is on) rather than HTTP availability (your site actually loads), masking application failures.
This is why independent monitoring matters. Our uptime figures come from HTTP checks every 60 seconds against the actual homepage — the metric that matches visitor experience.
AdvertisementWhat Causes Downtime (and What Good Hosts Do)
Top causes: hardware failure, DDoS attacks, botched updates, datacenter network issues, and resource overuse (your site exceeding CPU limits gets throttled or suspended).
Good hosts mitigate with: redundant hardware, DDoS mitigation, rolling updates, and resource dashboards that warn you before limits hit. Great hosts publish a status history — transparency is the strongest reliability signal.
Monitor Your Own Site (5 Minutes, Free)
Sign up for a free monitor (UptimeRobot, Better Stack, or HetrixTools): add your URL, set 60-second checks, and enable email/SMS alerts.
Run it for a month before trusting any host with a revenue site. Our published uptime figures exist so you can compare — but verify with your own monitoring, because your neighbors on a shared server affect your numbers.
🏆 The Bottom Line
99.9% is the minimum acceptable tier; 99.95%+ with transparent status reporting marks a serious host. And whatever the SLA says, monitor it yourself — your visitors’ experience is the only uptime that counts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is 100% uptime possible?
No — anyone claiming it is marketing. Even Google’s infrastructure has planned maintenance windows. The honest claim is 99.9–99.99% plus a real compensation policy.
What is a fair uptime SLA compensation?
Standard: a percentage of monthly fees credited for each 0.1% below the guarantee. If a host’s remedy is just “we’ll try harder,” the SLA is decorative.
Does planned maintenance count against uptime?
Usually not — and that’s legitimate. But maintenance should be scheduled off-peak and announced. Unannounced “maintenance” is often an outage wearing a costume.
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