How to Discover Your Site's Actual Uptime Statistics

If you've ever shopped for website hosting, you know that most companies boast 99.9 percent uptime for their services. Of course, no one ever claims to offer 100 percent since no one can promise that they can keep your site online without any instances of downtime whatsoever. The question is, even if you sign up with a hosting service that offers 99.9 percent uptime, how do you know that you're actually getting what you are paying for? Here are some tips to help you uncover your site's actual uptime statistics.

Once or Twice a Day Isn't Enough

Many people don't understand the need for website monitoring service. They figure if they check their sites once or twice a day and the site is up, that's all the information they need. The truth is, even ten minutes of downtime is too much if the outage goes unnoticed. Since you can't sit in front of a computer checking your site every minute of every day, you need a website monitoring service to do it for you. When you put the services of a website monitor to work for your business, the service will consistently check your site throughout the day, as often as a multiple times per minute, to ensure that your site is online and that you know about an outage the moment it occurs if your site does go down.

Knowing Exactly How Often Your Site Goes Down

In addition to knowing the moment your site goes down, a website monitoring service can help you determine exactly how often your site is offline. This will allow you to uncover the truth about how much uptime your site really is experiencing. Is it truly the 99.9 percent that your web host guaranteed? If not, why are you experiencing more than your fair share of downtime? A website monitor can help you determine this as well.

Exact Statistics You Can Share with the World

Not only can a quality website monitoring service alert you the moment downtime occurs and help you get a better handle on exactly how much downtime your site is experiencing and why the downtime may be occurring, but at Alertra you can see your site's exact uptime statistics and can share those statistics with the public with our uptime statistics page feature. With just a few clicks of your mouse, you can create a page that will publish your uptime statistics for you so that you can see exactly how much downtime your site has encountered. You can then share those statistics with the public (if they are impressive) or your hosting service (if issues need to be addressed).

Operating a website without knowing your uptime statistics is like flying blind in the world of downtime. Downtime can be extremely detrimental to your site's success. You need to take measures to ensure that your site is achieving the uptime it needs and that any issues with downtime are promptly addressed.