Why Reputation Matters More Than a Guarantee when It Comes to Website Uptime

If you’re looking for a hosting provider you’re probably taking a look at uptime guarantees to ensure that your site won’t be experiencing an excessive amount of website downtime. The problem is that uptime guarantees don’t mean all that much. In fact, some of them aren’t worth the paper they’d be written on if they weren’t posted online. What you need to do when selecting a website host is look for reviews that indicate the host offers consistent uptime and excellent customer support. Why is reputation more important than a written guarantee? Here’s what you need to know.

What Exactly Are They Guaranteeing?

First and foremost, you need to ask yourself exactly what your web host is guaranteeing when it comes to website uptime. Are they guaranteeing 100 percent uptime? If so, they’re selling you nothing but a myth and you’ll soon discover that when your website monitoring service begins to send you alerts telling you that your website has gone down. Most sites won’t offer a guarantee of 100 percent uptime. It is common, however, to see guarantees of 99 percent uptime. That may seem like a good guarantee, but you need to dig a bit deeper to understand how and why these guarantees are made.

Normally when a web host guarantees 99 percent uptime, they are guaranteeing that your site will not experience more than 1 percent (3.6 hours) of unscheduled downtime each month. Now if your web host notifies you that they are goiNow let’s say that your site does go down for more than 3.6 hours in a given month due to unforeseen events. Is the web host going to pay you the profits you lost? No, they are simply going to refund to you the amount of money that you paid for the time that your site was down. So, for example, if your hosting costs $20 per month, you’ll get a nice big refund of less than a dollar. As you can see, there’s no huge incentive for your web host to ensure your site’s uptime even if there is an uptime guarantee.

Reputation Is Everything

So if a web host’s uptime guarantee means nothing, how do you decide which web host is right for you? As stated above, you need to do a bit of homework. Do some research and check the reviews. If a site’s customers are taking the time to praise them online, they have to be doing something right.

If you do sign up with a web host and your website monitoring service is letting you know that something is wrong on a rather consistent basis, there’s nothing stopping you from moving from one host to another. In fact, you might have to try a couple of different web hosts if you don’t find the perfect one on your first attempt.