What is Uptime Guarantee & Why is it Important?
Is an uptime guarantee something you should look for? Web hosting companies often offer an uptime guarantee along with a money back guarantee.
It may initially sound like a great concept and one of the criterion you would want to use when choosing a hosting company. However, it may not be such a great idea after all.
When you first hear of an 99.9% uptime guarantee you probably think that means that your website is guaranteed to be up for 99.9% of all time.
Unfortunately that’s not what it means. What an uptime guarantee really means is that your web hosting company is going to do their best to achieve that percentage of uptime, and if they don’t they will give you some form of compensation.
At times web hosting companies don’t discuss what form your compensation will take. It is often more of a marketing ploy with really no uptime guarantee.
However, that’s only in extreme cases. Generally the form of compensation is spelled out, but the amount of compensation will be limited to what you pay for your hosting service. In addition, you will need to ask to be compensated. If the stated uptime guarantee was 99.9% and the actual uptime was only 88.9%, then 10% would be taken off your bill for the amount your hosting company was unable to achieve.
Another kind of compensation that web hosting companies might offer is to give you a free month on your hosting service. This second form of compensation is more generous. However, it still isn’t very meaningful. Another type of compensation is to offer a certain percentage off your web hosting fees for every hour’s worth of downtime, not to exceed 100% of your hosting fees.
Most uptime guarantee are based by the month. If your website happened to be offline for 10% of the month, it would be down for three days. If you get decent traffic to your website, 10% of downtime costs, which could be in lost sales or sign ups or whatever you lose from losing visitors, will add up to a lot more than your monthly web hosting fees.
In terms of the usual uptime guarantees that are given, a 99.% uptime guarantee translates to your website possibly being down for up to 216 minutes during a month, for 99.8% it would be 86.4 minutes, for 99.9% it would be up to 43.2 minutes and 99.999% would be about 26 seconds.
Really the only guarantee that is even worth anything is the one guaranteeing 99.9% uptime. The other downtimes are too big to be valuable.
No matter how you look at the numbers, you quickly realize that having an uptime guarantee does not really give you a guarantee for anything. An uptime guarantee isn’t going to be worth much to you if you are running a successful business.
The most common mistake we tend we all make is assuming an uptime guarantee does actually guarantee something meaningful. However, all it really means is that if there is excessive downtime you will receive some forth of compensation. It is kind of like when buying electronic equipment with a three year guarantee. The guarantee isn’t saying that the equipment is going to work without any problems for three years. It’s stating that if it does break, they will replace or repair it for you without charging you.
So why do these uptime guarantees even exist?
Web hosting companies do benefit from having uptime guarantees, through gaining the good will of their customers, gaining an edge over their competitors and gaining financially. An uptime guarantee can provide hosting companies with all of these things without them incurring much risk. If there is one hour of downtime for 100 customers probably less than 50 of those customers will even notice and maybe only about 20 will even be worried about it. Then maybe 10 of those customers will follow through and email or call to register a complaint. From those 10 customers probably about 8 will be satisfied knowing the web hosting service is addressing the problem. Then maybe the other 2 customers out of the original 100 will actually request compensation. These numbers are made up, but that’s approximately how it usually works.
To compound the problem, a web hosting company may request proof to show that the service really was down. Even if you do provide them with proof, it may be disregarded for several reasons: because of the fact that third party monitors can be unreliable, or your time was too slow, or the monitoring you are using is an in house service and they are positive they met their uptime guarantee according to the TOS that you agreed to. The word of the web hosting company has more power than yours does. Their decision in terms of uptime will be the final word.
In their TOS web hosting companies generally will exclude downtime for things like DDOS attacks, hurricanes, earthquakes and other types of exceptional events. They may even exclude times when they are performing server upgrades or even downtime that is caused by problems with software. This means there could be abuse of the guarantee as it is easy to blame a software problem or server upgrade for downtime.
Provided that not too many customers actually ask for and receive compensation, it’s a good deal for web hosting companies. They can gain a competitive advantage over competitors not offering uptime guarantees, make more sales (their financial gain), as well as gain the good will of their customers because a majority of people will be impressed with an uptime guarantee of 99.99%.
From a marketing standpoint, offering uptime guarantees are certainly worth the risk, which explains why we continue to see it offered.
There are web hosting companies who do not offer uptime guarantees because they feel it is a deceptive marketing practice. Ironically, it is often these services which consistently do have 99.9% uptime or better. These companies just don’t think that it’s fair guaranteeing something that isn’t always achievable due to the fact that it may give their customers false senses of security.
There are a very few web hosting companies that offer uptime guarantees and will actually notify their customers if established limites are not met and automatically compensate all the customers. That is probably the very best uptime guarantee ever.
Is the ultimate 100% uptime guarantee for real? The 100% uptime guarantee really is deceiving in terms of giving customers very unreasonable expectations. This type of claim just scream hype. It is impossible to achieve 100% uptime. Nothing in life is every 100% guaranteed.
The uptime guarantee itself is not necessarily bad. It is the way most hosting companies present it that is deceiving by making it appear that you will be definitely enjoying 100% uptime on a consistent basis, instead of informing unaware customers as to what that type of guarantee actually means.
Is that network or server uptime?
Hosts don’t always express this directly. When hosting companies guarantee 99.9% uptime, you may assume this is referring to your site being up and online 99.9% of all time. However reading the fine print of the SLA or TOS will show that the uptime guarantee is referring to the network instead of the actual server which is what really matters.
In other words your site could be inaccessible due to the server being down but if the network is still up they will say you do not qualify for a refund. You need to carefully read the TOS before singing up with any hosting service.
My advice would be to forget about the uptime guarantee. For websites that are not for business purposes an actual uptime of 95%, which is easy to achieve, is not too bad and you don’t really need the uptime guarantee.
For a business website, lost commissions and sales due to the times that the website is down is very important. You will almost never be fully compensated for your business losses by an uptime guarantee.
For business websites, you should rely on actual history of the web hosting company’s uptime. That can often be very difficult to find. You may request if from web hosting companies, but they may not always tell the truth. The best thing to do is contact clients who post reviews of hosting companies to ask them about their uptime over the number of years or months that they have had the hosting service.
Remember though that hosting companies have just as many uptimes as servers. Some of their servers may have outstanding uptimes records while others could have been offline for long periods of time. That can help explain why come customer recommend a hosting company for providing great uptime while other companies complain about theirs.
There are high quality hosting solutions that are used by big business. They may be able to guarantee certain levels of uptime because of their high redundancy degree. However, these are the ultimate hosting services that only Google, Yahoo and the like are able to afford. For the rest of us, an uptime guarantee is completely different.
Hopefully you will find a great hosting service that provides you will excellent uptimes, in fact so good that you will never need to think about being compensated for any downtime.
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