What is uptime?
Uptime is a term that indicates the extent to which your site has been available.
You can express it in time, such as “my website has been continuously available for 100 days” or “my website has been down for over an hour.” Or you can express it as a percentage, like “during January we had an uptime of 99.9%,” which means that your website was accessible 99.9% of the time (measured day and night).
Why uptime alone is not enough
Of course uptime is important, but it’s a very simplistic way of looking at things. When is something considered up, and when is it down?
For us, uptime is a basic requirement for every website. If you buy a car, you expect to be able to go from point A to point B. For us, a functioning car is like uptime: the basic requirement. But maybe you also expect the car to keep you dry in the rain? Or reach 120 km/h on the highway?
This article was written in March 2017. Today, even being unable to access your Facebook account for half a minute is considered a problem. Talking only about uptime today is outdated. Hosting is much more than that.
In our baseline “Hosting. Better.”, the basics like uptime are covered, but you as a customer can expect more proactive support for the performance of your websites. The value comes from the extras, not just the basics.
What about the SLA?
An SLA, or Service Level Agreement, is nothing more than an agreement between you and the host specifying what efforts you can expect from your hosting provider.
Most discussions around SLA focus on:
- Uptime guarantee in %: how much monthly uptime does the host guarantee?
- Response time: how quickly must the host respond?
- Resolution time: how quickly does the host guarantee a solution?
If the SLA is not met, penalty clauses may be applied, as the host has not done their job properly. If you have an SLA with your hosting partner, make sure you avoid the following pitfalls.
1. Too low %
The most common SLA is 99.9%. According to uptime.is, this means:
- Daily: 1m 26.4s
- Weekly: 10m 4.8s
- Monthly: 43m 49.7s
- Yearly: 8h 45m 57.0s
That’s right. With the most common SLA, your website may be down for 43 minutes per month. If this downtime happens at the wrong moment (e.g., during ticket sales after a major marketing campaign), those 43 minutes can be critical.
2. Too high %
If the SLA guarantees 100%, beware. The scope may be too limited because achieving 100% uptime on the internet is virtually impossible.
3. Responsibilities not defined
A website consists of several components, all of which must function for the site to work. There’s your domain name and the organization managing domains, the host providing the server, and the website builder who programmed it.
Think of it as separate links in a chain. From the moment one link is missing, everything goes wrong. Everyone carries a part of the responsibility.
Many SLAs overlook this and do not clearly indicate who is responsible for what. The result is an inevitable discussion and annoying misunderstandings as soon as something goes wrong.
4. Scope is too limited
The scope defines when your website is considered online. Does it mean the server is reachable from the internet? Is it just a simple yes/no scenario, or are nuances defined in the SLA?
For example, it doesn’t help if the host has done their job, but something goes wrong with the website itself. Then you might see this: …
