How Website Monitoring Service Can Tell You If Your Hosting Plan is Working Out for You

When you signed up for your current hosting plan, you were probably promised or even guaranteed a certain amount of uptime, such as 99 percent or 99.9 percent, giving you the confidence that your website would almost always be up and available whenever your customers wanted access to it. There are some things that you need to take into consideration, however, before you can put much stock into that uptime percentage you were promised. Before you just take your hosting provider’s word for your uptime rate and assume you have the right hosting plan or hosting provider, consider these tips and understand how website monitoring service can ensure you indeed have the best hosting plan for your website.

The Difference Between 99 Percent and 99.999 Percent

The first thing you need to realize is that there is a huge difference between a host that offers 99 percent website uptime and one that promises 99.999 percent uptime. If you are promised 99.999 percent uptime, you can reasonably expect only about 5 minutes of unplanned downtime each year. On the other hand, if you are promised 99 percent uptime, that equates to about 3 days, 15 hours, and 39 minutes of downtime each year. That is quite a significant difference, so make sure you pay close attention to the percentage that is being touted by your hosting provider. Once hosting is in place, a website monitoring service will be able to tell you if you are actually achieving the website uptime rate that was promised to you.

That Uptime Guarantee Only Applies to Unplanned Downtime

The second thing you need to realize is that uptime guarantee that you were given only applies to unplanned downtime. If your site goes down due to planned website downtime, such as the downtime that occurs with server upgrades and maintenance, that specific downtime does not apply to your uptime guarantee. Your host may not even alert you that such downtime is going to happen, which is why a website monitoring service is absolutely necessary if you want to keep an eye on your website downtime and know about it the moment it occurs.

Getting Alerts Regarding Website Downtime

If you have signed up with a hosting plan and your site is going down much more frequently than you had been led to believe it would, you need to consider one of two things. Either you need to upgrade your hosting plan with your current provider or, if the provider is the issue, you may need to change hosting providers altogether.

While your hosting provider may have a guarantee against unplanned website downtime, that guarantee is limited to unplanned downtime and the amount of compensation that they are responsible for reimbursing you for is the actual cost of your hosting during the actual unplanned downtime, which usually only equates to a few dollars, if that. Your hosting provider is not responsible for any losses you may have incurred due to that downtime. This means you absolutely need a quality website monitoring service in place to let you know if your website downtime is growing to unacceptable levels so you can take proper action and change plans or move hosting providers should you need to in order to protect your bottom line.