"99.9% uptime" shows up on almost every hosting company's homepage. Here's what that percentage actually translates to in real, practical terms.
Doing the Math
99.9% uptime allows for roughly 8.7 hours of downtime per year — sounds small as a percentage, but a single multi-hour outage at the wrong moment (during a sale, a marketing campaign, or peak business hours) can be genuinely costly.
Why Uptime Matters
- A site that's down loses every sale or lead that would have happened during that window
- Frequent downtime damages customer trust in your business's reliability
- Search engines can penalise sites with frequent, prolonged outages
What Causes Downtime
- Server hardware failures or overload
- Scheduled maintenance (usually brief and pre-announced by a good host)
- DDoS attacks or other malicious traffic
- Software or configuration errors
How to Check a Host's Real Track Record
Marketing claims are one thing — ask directly about historical uptime data, or check independent monitoring services if available, rather than taking a homepage number at face value.
What We Aim For
Our infrastructure is built for consistent reliability, with network protection and monitoring in place specifically to minimise unplanned downtime. See our cloud hosting for infrastructure built with redundancy in mind.