What is wrong with all those webhost with their uptime guarantees, sure it is nice if your webhost is giving you a 99.9% uptime guarantee, but what does this mean, and how are they calculating this number. And not less important, do you want your webhost to go bankrupt because of a bad monday ?

Okay, I take it that a bad monday would not bring a decent company to the ground, but servers need to be payed, if they where online or offline. This is where things get interesting.

Bottom line, when a host offers you a 99.9% uptime, ask them about their refund policy, how to get the refund when their server did go down, who is deciding what happened (external monitoring company, or the host themselves), and how they make clear they are going to have scheduled maintenance on your server. But do not expect any host to deliver a high uptime for a low budget.
What exactly do webhost offer these days, if it comes to 99.9% uptime, and what is NOT included in this figure.

– beyond reasonable control.
– upstream network outages.
– internet backbone congestion.
– facility power failures.
– planned outages.

But what is included then ? and who is deciding what and where it did go wrong. And more important where do they get this 99.9% figure from, there are many webhosts having all kind of banners from a monitoring service on their website, showing proudly they have 99.9% uptime, but on which server? has this company only one server ? and how about the others ? is this only their business website which is 99.9% up ?

Another good question is, how is the 99.9% calculated, by week, by month or by year, and does a customer realize that 99.9% is still some time of the month the website may be unreachable.

Now i can say from experience that most customers do not care, a few hours in the month that their server can’t be reached is not a biggy, and email will be deliverd with a bit of delay, but there are other customers which do care, and 99.9% is not enough. Are there companies out there which dare to go to the 100% ? I would go there, and give them what they want, but as with everything in this world this would come for a price, but would never tell a customer that 100% isnt possible, as i believe it is possible, just not cheap.