Some Things You May Not Have Considered about Website Uptime

We here at Alertra talk a lot about website uptime, website monitoring and what happens when websites go down. It’s only natural that we would discuss the importance of website monitoring every now and then. We know that you realize that website uptime is vitally important to your business. Here are some things we think everyone should know about website uptime and why website monitoring is so crucial to your business.

Numbers Can Be Deceiving

Let’s say you’re looking for a new web host or you already went with one that boasted 95 percent uptime ratio. That seems like a really good number doesn’t it? Actually, it’s quite terrible when you do the math. When you consider the fact that there are 365 days in a year, an uptime of 95 percent means that your site was down for more than 18 of those days. That’s more than half a month. This means that your site couldn’t conduct business, or collect revenue, for more than half of a month out of the year.

When you look at the big picture, an uptime of 95 percent doesn’t seem that good after all. That’s why we urge our customers to find reputable web hosts who offer an uptime of 99.9 percent. Website uptime of 99.9 percent means that your site is only down for hours each year, not weeks.

Your Host’s Uptime Rating Has Nothing to Do with Performance

That uptime number that your host boasts might be accurate in regards to your site being live on the Web, but it likely has nothing to do with the actual performance of your website. Server slowdowns can be just as frustrating as outages when it comes to what your customers have to deal with.

As an Alertra customer, you’re notified if your site is experiencing performance issues. If you notice it happening more frequently than it should, you can take measures to upgrade your hosting plan or move to a new site host altogether.

Uptime is Money

The fact of the matter is that if your site is profit driven, then uptime is money. If you’re with a hosting company that has you offline for more than a few hours each year, then you need to look for a hosting provider that better understands the needs of your business – and one of those primary needs is being able to pull a profit. That’s kind of hard to do when your website isn’t even available for your customers to access.

Do yourself a favor. Let us worry about notifying you when your site goes offline, but make sure you take measures into your own hands and address it with your web host if you seem to be getting more notifications from us than you think you should be.