Uptime is the percentage of time your website is reachable. Hosts often advertise "99.9% uptime", but what does it mean in practice?
Uptime in real time
| Uptime | Downtime per month (approx.) | Downtime per year (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| 99% | 7.2 hours | 3.65 days |
| 99.9% | 43 minutes | 8.8 hours |
| 99.99% | 4.3 minutes | 53 minutes |
What to check in an uptime promise
- Is it a guarantee with compensation, or only a marketing target?
- Does it exclude scheduled maintenance?
- How do you claim credit?
Why downtime happens
- Server or network failures
- Overloaded shared servers
- Software problems on your own site, such as a bad plugin update
How to monitor your site
Use a free uptime monitor that pings your site every few minutes and emails you. You can also view the current server state on our status page.
How to reduce your own downtime
- Keep software updated, but back up first.
- Make your site lighter. See speed tips.
- Choose hosting that fits your traffic. See how to buy hosting.
How uptime is calculated
Uptime equals the time your website was reachable divided by the total time, usually per month. The calculation seems simple, but the details matter: which server checks count, how often the checks run, and whether partial outages are included. A provider might measure only whether the server responds, while your visitors may see errors from the database or PHP layer.
What causes outages
- Hardware failure: disks, memory or network equipment.
- Software issues: faulty updates or misconfiguration.
- Attacks: traffic floods or malicious scripts on shared servers.
- Human error: mistaken changes during maintenance.
- Your own website: plugin conflicts, exhausted limits, expired domain or SSL.
Check these before blaming your host
- Is the domain active and not expired?
- Do nameservers and DNS still point to the right place?
- Is the SSL certificate valid?
- Did you hit a resource limit?
- Did you update a plugin or theme recently?
Set up uptime monitoring
Choose a monitor that checks your homepage and a key page every 1 to 5 minutes from several locations, and alerts you by email or messaging. Over months, you will see a real uptime figure and any patterns, such as slowdowns at certain hours.
What good providers do
Good providers monitor their servers, publish incidents openly, announce maintenance in advance and respond quickly to tickets. You can see our current server status on the status page and follow announcements.
FAQ
Is 99.9% uptime good?
It is a common standard. A higher percentage means even less allowed downtime but usually costs more.
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