Uptime and reliability

What the percentages mean

Convert them into time and they become concrete. Ninety-nine per cent allows more than three days offline in a year, and ninety-nine point nine allows nearly nine hours.

Reputable hosting sits above that, and for a small business site the difference between the top tiers is not worth paying attention to.

What matters more is whether the outages are short and spread out or long and concentrated. Four hours in one stretch during a working day costs more than the same total spread over a year.

Percentages also describe the past rather than the future. A figure published by a provider is a record of what happened, not a commitment about what will.

What actually takes a small site down

An expired domain. A lapsed card on the hosting account. A certificate that failed to renew. Those three account for the large majority of small business outages and none are the host's fault.

All three are administrative and all three are preventable. Auto-renewal on the domain and a current card on file removes most of the risk in ten minutes.

Make sure the renewal notices reach somebody. They are frequently sent to an address set up years ago by whoever registered the domain, and nobody has read that inbox since.

Our page on domain names covers why the domain is the most damaging of the three, since it takes down email as well.

How to prevent the common cases

The list below is the whole of practical reliability work for a small business site. None of it is technical and all of it is one-time.

• Auto-renewal on the domain
• A card on file that has not expired
• Renewal notices going to an address somebody reads
• Automatic certificate renewal confirmed
• A monitoring service checking the site
• An alert that reaches a phone
• A note of who to contact at the provider

Find out before a customer does

A free monitoring service checks your site every few minutes and messages you when it stops responding. That converts an outage you learn about from a customer into one you learn about immediately.

Set the alert to reach a phone rather than an inbox. An outage notification sitting unread is the same as no notification.

Free monitoring is genuinely useful here and costs nothing to set up. Ten minutes once converts every future outage from something a customer tells you about into something you already knew.

Check the contact form separately, because a site can be up while its form silently fails. Our page on maintenance covers that check.

Speed is the reliability you feel

Complete outages on reputable hosting are rare. A slow site is the reliability problem a visitor actually encounters, and it happens every day rather than once a year.

That is where attention is better spent for most small businesses. Our page on site performance covers what to measure and in what order.

A site that is up and takes eight seconds to load has lost the visitor as effectively as one that is down, and it does not show in any uptime figure.

The same applies to anything on the page that depends on another service. A map, a booking widget or a review feed can fail on its own while the site around it is perfectly healthy.

Reading an uptime commitment

An uptime commitment in a hosting agreement usually entitles you to a credit against your bill rather than compensation for lost business. Read what it actually offers.

For a small site the credit is trivial. The commitment is mainly useful as a signal of what the provider expects of itself.

Choose on reputation and support responsiveness instead. When something does go wrong, reaching somebody quickly is worth more than any percentage in a document.

Find out how support is reached before you need it. A provider whose only route is a form with a two-day response is a different proposition at nine on a Monday morning.