Why you should care about your business's uptime
Your uptime percentage indicates how long your website was available without any interruption. Find out in this article why you should care.
Jelle De Laender - 15 September 2020Your uptime percentage indicates how long your website was available without any interruption. Find out in this article why you should care.
Jelle De Laender - 15 September 2020Your uptime percentage indicates how long your website was available without any interruption. In this article, we explain where you can find your uptime percentage, how should you interpret it, and - more importantly- why you should care.
Uptime is the official term for the time your website was up and running without interruption. It is the exact opposite of 'downtime', which is the time your website was not working or loading as expected.
People usually express uptime as a monthly percentage. So if you have a monthly uptime percentage of 99.8%, that means that your website was online 99.8% of the time. That may seem reasonable until you realize that 99.8% uptime means that your website was offline for 1.5 hours that month.
If you want to know how your uptime percentage translates into lost hours or minutes, this table can be useful.
| Availability % | Downtime per year | Downtime per month | Downtime per day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 90% ("one nine") | 36.53 days | 73.05 hours | 2.40 hours |
| 95% ("one and a half nines") | 18.26 days | 36.53 hours | 1.20 hours |
| 97% | 10.96 days | 21.92 hours | 43.20 minutes |
| 98% | 7.31 days | 14.61 hours | 28.80 minutes |
| 99% ("two nines") | 3.65 days | 7.31 hours | 14.40 minutes |
| 99.5% ("two and a half nines") | 1.83 days | 3.65 hours | 7.20 minutes |
| 99.8% | 17.53 hours | 87.66 minutes | 2.88 minutes |
| 99.9% ("three nines") | 8.77 hours | 43.83 minutes | 1.44 minutes |
| 99.95% ("three and a half nines") | 4.38 hours | 21.92 minutes | 43.20 seconds |
| 99.99% ("four nines") | 52.60 minutes | 4.38 minutes | 8.64 seconds |
| 99.995% ("four and a half nines") | 26.30 minutes | 2.19 minutes | 4.32 seconds |
| 99.999% ("five nines") | 5.26 minutes | 26.30 seconds | 864.00 milliseconds |
As a business owner, you cannot afford to neglect your uptime. Your online presence is becoming increasingly important, and every minute of downtime can have a severe impact.
By now you are probably wondering about your own uptime. The only way to know your uptime percentage is to monitor your website for a month and see whether it goes offline. And that is precisely what our monitoring tool Semonto does. But it does more than that. Semonto also alerts you immediately when your website is having problems so that you can quickly resolve the issue before your business is affected.
Your website is running on a server. The company that is managing that server is called a hosting firm. The person who built your website may also be your hoster, but sometimes your website is being hosted by a third party. In any case, your web developer can usually tell you who your hosting partner is. Via the monthly uptime reports, you can easily review your average uptime of the last months and check if your web hosting company is delivering what is promised. Not all web hosting companies are sharing their performance openly. With the objective uptime report Semonto gives you, you can make your own conclusions based on trusted data.
Do you want to know the uptime of your website or webshop? Get a free trial of Semonto and find out!
