When you are searching for a web host one of the most important questions that needs to be addressed is what their uptime percentage is. It is a lot of fun to have a web site up that you created, but you want to be sure that it is available to customers as much as possible. You do not want a company that has lower uptime than a 99.8 uptime percentage. This indicates the monthly percentage that your web site will be available available. So what would be your total down time in a year with some of these top mentioned percentages? Here is a list:
98% 7.3 days
99.0% 3.7 days
99.9% 8 hours
99.99% 1 hour
99.999% 5 minutes
You can monitor your sites uptime with a monitoring application. This application is written in computer code and will visit the specified web site. When it checks in on the web site the uptime monitor will check all the systems to be sure they are functioning. There are very complex monitors and then there are also simple and free monitors available. So will have the option to take a screen shot of the page error, this helps extremely when you need to try and figure out a resolution to the problem. You can use a ping report to see if a site is functional as well, if you receive a ping back you know the site is functioning if you don't receive a ping back you know that there is a problem that needs to be corrected. These applications also have a visiting log, an incident log and the sites performance history. It is important to keep up on this information, if you see a consistent problem you need to contact your host for a solution.
When it comes to web hosting there are three things you need; great customer support 24 hours per day, high percentage uptime of 99.8% or higher and affordable web hosting cost.
