Did You Know That 99% Uptime From Some Web Hosts Means That Your Site Could Be Inaccessible for 87 Hours 39 Minutes Annually?

Web hosts are fond of claiming that they have a record of 99 per cent or 99.9 per cent server uptime, which usually sounds very impressive to the rest of us. And as you will discover when you are through reading this article, that’s because most of us do not have a good head for small text in the terms and conditions policy of most web hosting providers. If we did, we would be a little concerned about these efficiency claims.

First, the uptime many hosts quote refer only to the server being powered on and does not account for network downtime. In fact, real downtime can potentially be much larger than the percentage guaranteed. This is why opting for service level agreements that take into account downtime and compensate for it with reduced costs or refunds is not such a bad idea. Sadly, this is an option that is not always available with many leading web hosting service providers.

Even more alarming is when you begin to assess the potential downtime that you could finally end up with in a whole year. What happens immediately is that the 99 per cent uptime does not look so good any more.

Sample this: 98 per cent uptime means that in a complete year or 12-month period, your site could be down for a total of 175 hours and 19 minutes. Wow, that’s approximately a week. That is a lot of time, but it doesn't get any better. 99 per cent uptime which psychologically sounds very impressive, when translated into numbers means that your site could be inaccessible for a whole 87 hours and 39 minutes during any given year. 99.9 per cent may be a little acceptable because it means that your site will be down for 8 hours 46 minutes during an entire 12 months. That is actually an entire day in terms of office working hours.

The best recommendation is to choose a web hosting provider that has been in business for at least six to eight years, has a U.S. based support staff that is in-house (no outsourcing), a reliable track record and one that is available twenty-four hours a day by either toll free telephone or live chat. This way, if anything does go wrong, you can reach their staff at any time, and they will be knowledgeable and actually concerned with the service provided. Outsourcing technical support to a third-world country is common in the web hosting industry and many webmasters are not even aware their provider is doing this, until something goes wrong and they try and contact the support staff for help.

Another recommendation is to choose a web hosting provider whose uptime guarantee is based on a 30 day rolling average. If your web hosting provider bases their uptime guarantee on a yearly average, you could be out of luck when requesting credits for downtime.

The bottom line is that problems happen. Most professional and responsible web hosting providers will do all they can to prevent problems from occurring, but if something does go wrong and your site goes down, you want to have a uptime guarantee in place that is fair and based on a thirty day average.

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Established in 1998, U.S. website hosting company Website Source, Inc. provides a weekly website hosting news column for webmasters. Website Source offers many quality, cheap web hosting options for individuals, personal home pages, dating, blogs, family pages, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting and reseller or dedicated server plans for personal or small business websites. Each plan comes with free ready-made websites that make it easy to setup professional looking pages within minutes! In an era of out-sourcing, we are proud of our in-house, Texas based customer support personnel who stand guard ready to assist you at any time, twenty-four hours a day. Give us a try and you will see just how easy, convenient and affordable it is to get started with Website Source. The hosting order form is easy to complete and you can be online in minutes.

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