Uptime and Downtime are two of the most important words of web hosting world as major part of the service quality provided by the web hosting provider depends on these two factors.
The most annoying thing for a webmaster is facing a unwanted downtime for his website. After analyzing all the things one can become aware of the fact there are many reasons for bringing a website down and unreachable for visitors. There are few unavoidable factors like scheduled maintenance and any updation required to that particular website, but the webmasters are generally prepared in advance for these type of downtimes as they has a fair reasons but when such circumstances occur at unexpected times then they are really difficult moments for webmasters as well as for visitors of that website also. Reseller Web Hosting vendors also have to face a big problem of loosing their clients because of any mistake by the main web hosting services provider. The only solution is for all this is 'Uptime'. As the word 'uptime' itself describe 'the amount of time for which a web server is capable to run or display a website smoothly without any interruption is known as 'uptime' of that website. E-commerce website which deal in real-time online money transaction are very sensitive regarding their uptime. A good web hosting company is generally expected to provide more than 99.90 % of uptime. We find few companies claiming for 100 % uptime for collecting more and more web hosting order but 100% uptime is almost impossible for a normal web server, but it is achievable only with the newly arrival of cloud hosting type because it is based on virtualization techniques. So uptime is one of the most important feature to be looked at while choosing a web hosting provider. Downtime is the concept used opposite to uptime which mean the amount of time for which the website is not available for visit or use. Both uptime and downtime are counted on monthly basis. Though any webmaster would never like to get his website for a few minutes also but normal web server is capable of keeping a website up for 99.99%. of the total time counted for a particular time span. For minimizing the loss due to any unavoidable downtimes which are occurred due to scheduled maintenance by web hosting service providing companies, such type of scheduled maintenance to be carried during the time when a website is visited by minimum number of visitors. Providing information to visitors about these periods is also an essential recommendation to webmasters.
Disadvantages of Dowtime
An unexpected downtime not only damage the reputation of a website form visitors point of view but now a days Search engines also started to consider it as a major degrading factor in indexation process, hence now a days a webmaster can not afford such a big loss due to downtime for his website. The new generation visitors are also very well aware of the other substitute options available for products and services provided by a webmaster and they quickly move away for them as soon as they find any service unavailable so its big threat of loosing the customer permanently due to your website is down for short period of time also.
How to avoid Downtime
Before selecting a web hosting company any webmaster should check out for the all uptime records provided by a web hosting services provider in the past to its customers, this shows capability of that particular hosting vendor of keeping the website up as per claimed by it. Selecting a Hosting type also plays major role in this as the cPanel Linux hosting services are found with the many issues on servers due to some malfunction performed by other webmasters on the same server and in dedicated server hostingas the total server belongs to a single webmaster only all the blame to be given to him only if the server goes down because of any activity performed by him. SLAs (Service Level Agreements) is very important factor of any web hosting deal as it contains the compensation in the case if that particular web hosting company could not provide the claimed uptime mentioned in the contract. A webmaster can decide the amount of such compensation after having prior communication with the hosting vendor. This amount can vary according to the different website as the size of money transaction is different.
Considering all these aspect one can realize the importance of the uptime and monitoring it continuously.
