What exactly does uptime mean in the cloud hosting industry?

What is uptime?

The dictionary definition of uptime constitutes the time during which a piece of equipment, such as a computer, is functioning or able to function.  In terms of cloud hosting, uptime is defined as the percentage of time that your server or website is active and able to function during the course of a year.  For example, if a Cloud Server has an uptime average of 99.5%, this means that for all but 1.83 days per year, you can expect that your website/server will remain active.

Many cloud hosting companies create aggressive SLAs around their uptime guarantee, whether it’s a 99%, 99.9%, or 100% uptime guarantee.  Having a hosting provider that guarantees uptime is much better than one that doesn’t.  Keep in mind – uptime guarantees do not include scheduled outages or maintenance.  Some common uptime guarantees are broken down into a mathematical translation of expected downtime include:

• 98% uptime = 28.8 minutes/day or 3.4 hours/week or 14.4 hours/month or 7.3 days/year
• 99% uptime = 14.4 minutes/day or 1.7 hours/week or 7.2 hours/month or 3.65 days/year
• 99.5% uptime = 7.2 minutes/day or 0.84 hours/week or 3.6 hours/month or 1.83 days/year
• 99.9% uptime = 1.44 minutes/day or 0.17 hours/week or 0.72 hours/month or 8.8 hours/year

Uptime is very important for businesses who rely heavily on their websites, or whose customers rely on them.  If customers start thinking your business’ website is unreliable, they may stop coming back, resulting in loss of sales.  Even more, if search engines like Google start to think that your website is unreliable, they will stop visiting as well, resulting in poor search engine results.

At Atlantic.Net, our industry-leading SLAs are backed by a 100% Uptime Guarantee.  This means that we guarantee all critical infrastructure components will be available 100% of the time in a given month, excluding scheduled maintenance.  No one can guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong, but with a 100% uptime SLA, we set the expectation to do the very best possible.  Atlantic.Net’s Cloud Hosting is faster – take it for a test drive!  Call 800-521-5881 today to take advantage of our free $25 trial of our cloud servers!

Atlantic.net also offers HIPAA compliant hosting solutions with HIPAA disaster recovery – contact us today for a consultation.