Uptime
Uptime is the percentage of time your website is online and working. '99.9% uptime' means your site is almost always available — and the small gap is the downtime that costs you customers.
Also known as: downtime · uptime guarantee · site availability
In plain English
Uptime is simply how much of the time your website is up and reachable, written as a percentage. No site is online 100% of the time forever, so hosts talk in nines — 99.9% uptime means your site is down only a tiny fraction of the year. Downtime is the flip side: the moments your site is unreachable.
Why it matters for your business
Every minute your site is down is a minute customers can't find you, buy from you, or contact you — and they rarely come back to try again later. Downtime during a busy period, an ad campaign, or a product launch is especially expensive. Worse, downtime often happens without you knowing, because you're not sitting on your own site all day.
How it's protected
Reliable hosting is the first line of defense, and around-the-clock uptime monitoring is the second — it catches an outage the moment it happens and kicks off a fix, instead of waiting for a customer to tell you something's wrong.
Common questions
- What's a good uptime percentage?
- 99.9% is the common benchmark for business hosting — that's roughly 8 hours of downtime a year. The difference between 99.9% and 99% sounds tiny but is actually days of extra downtime, so the decimals matter.
- How would I even know if my site went down?
- Often you wouldn't, until a customer mentions it — which is the worst way to find out. Uptime monitoring watches your site around the clock and alerts the moment it goes offline, so it can be fixed before it costs you much.
Related terms
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