Is 99% Hosting Uptime Enough?

When you see a 99% guarantee, it’s usually a good thing. However, when you are running an online business that is running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year… you can’t afford to be down even just 1%? While 99% seems like a high number, the chart below really puts things into perspective at how long your sites or landing pages could be down over the course of a year.

It’s one thing if you have a blog or web site that is down, but the serious money is if your sales and landing pages are down. Not only can you lost money on paying per click, but there is almost no chance of that visitor coming back.

So what can you do? There are a lot of web hosting providers that gaurantee 99.99% uptime, but even in those rare moments when your site is down, there are also services available that can notify you once your site goes down.

I just recently got setup with ObservePoint, which monitors and notifies you when your sites go down. This week I was also doing some server work and transferred this blog and a few others sites to new servers. During the process, this site was down momentarily and I was notified by ObservePoint. An example of their notification system is shown below.

ObservePoint is just one of many web site monitoring services available. You can search google for “hosting downtime” and you will see a ton of different services. What I liked best about ObservePoint was I didn’t have to install anything on the server, and it was setup almost instantly. This may sound like a sales page, but ObservePoint doesn’t even know I wrote about this… just satisfied with their service and thought it would make for an interesting post on downtime issues.

If you’ve ever had an issue with downtime, or your site had a problem and no one bothered to tell you about it, a monitoring system can easily pay for itself in no time. OP also is offering a 7 day trial for anyone interested.

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19 Comments

  1. I'm glad you wrote this article, Zac. I used to work on a large government high availability network. I'm shocked today how many otherwise 'sharp as a tack' marketers and other entrepreneurs accept what is actually quite poor service. The same guys who would have a coronary meltdown if, say theur bank overcharged them ten cents a month, think nothing of service providers who actually steal way more than pennies in terms of lost opportunity money. Once you start making a few thousand a month or so, you don't just need a good server, you need a backup server and software to fail over automatically.

    If you were say doing $6,000 a month, on average a 99.9% availability will cost you over $318.00, each and every month. really think you can't afford a backup?

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  2. I need a website hosting company who has also great customer support and whose service is impeccable. Philippine setting.

  4. I had all of my sites go down for 2 days while I was on vacation last year, cost me hundreds so I could have used a service like this. Do they offer mobile updates?

    Steve

  5. When 99% gets put into perspective in this manner it is quite sobering indeed! If you are running a serious web-based enterprise 3.6 days worth of downtime a year is just not acceptable! I just can not believe how bad a 99% rating actually is!

  6. Yes I didn't realize that 99% was this bad either. Basically any website host can fool customers by bragging of at least 99% uptime when it is really a low number. If you rely on search engine rankings, it is must to avoid all downtime. The search engines don't like sites on unreliable servers. If it happens too often, you can drop in rankings significantly.

  8. 99% up time is definitely not enough as evident by your chart. @Steve, I don't know if they do offer mobile uploads as I don't see it on their website, but mobile uploads would be a fantastic feature to offer sure. Especially like you said you were on vacation for 2 days, so imagine if you were on vacation longer..a mobile upload would have been a life saver.

    Till then,

    Jean

  9. Sounds like a great service. Specially if you are selling something online. Which as of now means I don't qualify for.

  12. Downtime is a huge issue and I never realized how much difference even a 10th of a percent can make. You have to be really careful who you host your company with because some are even lower than 99 percent most of the times.

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  13. Thanks for helpful referral, thanks!

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  14. I like your simple chart presentation as it helps me understand how "downtime" affects our website's possible earnings. ObservePoint worth checking into. Thanks!

  16. @Jeremy:

    @used tires:

    Hello !

    This is Gary Livingston with ObservePoint. You mentioned mobile uploads. Are you refering to text alerts? We do offer mobile texting alerts. When an offer you’re promoting goes down or it is loading too slow we will alert you immediately via text message and there is no extra cost for that. We also send out email alerts. If you were looking for more capabilities I would love to your thoughts.

    Thanks !

    Gary

  18. good post..to increase uptime and to get high quality monitoring services with over 15 monitoring locations across the globe and to control uptime and latency for your website and/or server, try monitorscout services..try monitor scout services..

  19. nice post..every minute your website experiencing downtine translate into lost money and the longer it takes to reduce that something bad happened, the higher the cost will be. In order to reduce impact of downtime website monitoring services is required.

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