Websites and hosting
Uptime
The percentage of time a website or system is available. 99.9% allows about 43 minutes of downtime a month; 99% allows over seven hours.
What uptime means in practice
The arithmetic is worth doing because the numbers look similar and are not. Each additional nine costs considerably more to deliver, so the honest question for a small business is how much downtime actually costs it, rather than reaching for the highest figure available.
The more useful question is how you would find out. Plenty of businesses discover an outage because a customer rings, which means the clock started long before anyone noticed. Monitoring that alerts someone who can act is usually a bigger practical improvement than a better uptime figure on paper, and it is far cheaper. Agree who receives the alert before agreeing the percentage, because an alert nobody owns is the same as no monitoring at all.
Talk to us about IT support or a project
Tell us what is going on and we will tell you straight whether we can help, what it would cost, and how quickly we can be there. No hard sell.
Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm