A guarantee of your site's availability
What Is Uptime?
A detailed explanation of uptime — what 99.9% means, how much downtime is allowed, what an SLA is and how to monitor your site's availability.
What is uptime and what does 99.9% mean?
Uptime is the percentage of time a site/server is available and functional. 99.9% uptime ("three nines") = a maximum of 8h 46min of downtime per year. 99.99% ("four nines") = 52 minutes. 99.999% ("five nines") = 5 minutes (enterprise level). Downtime is caused by: maintenance, network errors, hardware failure, DDoS attacks. BeoHosting guarantees 99.9% for shared and 99.99% for VPS/dedicated.
- Uptime = % of available time
- 99.9% = 8h 46min downtime per year
- 99.99% = 52min downtime per year
- BeoHosting: 99.9% shared, 99.99% VPS
- Monitoring: status.beohosting.com
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What is uptime and why does it matter?
Uptime is the percentage of time a server (and your site on it) is available and functional for visitors. The opposite of uptime is downtime — the period when a site is unavailable.
Uptime is expressed as a percentage — the closer to 100%, the better. The industry standard for quality hosting is 99.9% uptime, which means a maximum of 8 hours and 46 minutes of unavailability per year. BeoHosting guarantees 99.9% uptime on all hosting plans.
Every "nine" after the decimal point drastically reduces the allowed downtime. The difference between 99% and 99.9% is enormous — 99% allows 3.6 days of downtime per year, while 99.9% allows only 8.76 hours. For serious web hosting, this difference is critical.
Uptime percentages — how much downtime is allowed?
See how much unavailability each uptime level permits.
Daily
14 min 24 sec
Monthly
7 hours 18 min
Yearly
3 days 15 hours 36 min
Daily
7 min 12 sec
Monthly
3 hours 39 min
Yearly
1 day 19 hours 48 min
Daily
1 min 26 sec
Monthly
43 min 50 sec
Yearly
8 hours 46 min
Daily
43 sec
Monthly
21 min 55 sec
Yearly
4 hours 23 min
Daily
8.6 sec
Monthly
4 min 23 sec
Yearly
52 min 36 sec
Why is uptime important for your business?
Downtime is not just a technical problem — it has direct consequences for your business and revenue.
Lost revenue
Every minute of unavailability means lost visitors and potential customers. For an e-commerce site with around $920 in daily revenue, 1 hour of downtime costs about $38 in lost turnover.
SEO penalties
Google lowers the ranking of sites that are frequently unavailable. A crawler that cannot reach your site records this as a negative signal, which harms your search position in the long run.
Loss of trust
Visitors who hit an unavailable site lose trust in your brand. Research shows that 88% of users will not return to a site after a bad experience.
Team productivity
If employees rely on your site (internal tools, CRM, email), downtime directly affects the productivity of the whole team until the problem is resolved.
What is an SLA (Service Level Agreement)?
An SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a formal document that defines the guaranteed level of service between a hosting provider and the customer. In the context of uptime, the SLA precisely states the percentage of availability the provider guarantees.
The key elements of a hosting SLA are:
Guaranteed uptime
The percentage of time the server must be available. The industry standard is 99.9%. BeoHosting guarantees 99.9% uptime.
Downtime compensation
If the provider fails to meet the SLA, you usually receive account credit. Typically 5-10% of the monthly amount for each hour of downtime above the allowance.
SLA exclusions
Planned maintenance, DDoS attacks and issues beyond the provider's control (natural disasters) are usually not covered by the SLA guarantee.
Claim procedure
The SLA defines how to report downtime and request compensation. Usually you need to report the issue through the ticket system within a set period.
Tools for monitoring uptime
Use these tools to monitor your site's availability and get notified of problems.
UptimeRobot
Free planA free plan with checks every 5 minutes for up to 50 sites. Notifications via email, SMS and Slack. The most popular free uptime monitoring tool.
Pingdom
A professional tool with detailed reports on performance, load speed and uptime. It tests your site from several locations worldwide.
StatusCake
Free planOffers a free plan with checks every 5 minutes. Besides uptime, it tests page speed, the SSL certificate and domain status.
Better Stack (Uptime)
Free planA modern tool with a status page, integrations for Slack/Discord/PagerDuty and detailed incident reports.
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