Why Is It Important?
People with varying needs, always find it difficult to find a suitable web hosting company, as most web host companies fail to meet their demanding needs. But, finding a good web host company is essential when one wants to setup a website.
While doing this, there are various factors that are taken into consideration. Things such bandwidth allocation, disk space, web tools, the control panel that is offered, security, customer support and uptime guarantee are considered before making the final decision.
In web hosting terms, ‘uptime’, means the amount of guaranteed time during which the site will stay online. Look for those web host companies that can offer an almost 99.9 percent of uptime. Companies that are willing to offer 100 percent ‘uptime’ aren’t to be trusted, as 100 percent just isn’t possible. Bear in mind, that higher the uptime guarantee, better is the web hosting services. With such companies, one doesn’t have to face an unhealthy amount of ‘downtime’; resulting in a better quality website.
Monitor Server Uptime
To ensure that a web hosting company is delivering on the guaranteed uptime, a user can monitor this by referring to 3rd party monitoring sites. There are a number of these sites that keep a track of things and list the best web host companies, according to their performance. Two of such prominent monitoring sites are – Alertra & Internetseer. Also, those web host’s, which operates on a redundant network – i.e utilize more than one data line to the internet – are more reliable than those who rely (utilize) a single data line. Both these 3rd party monitoring sites have free and paid monitoring plans, and can be chosen depending on the amount of ‘thorough monitoring’ that is required for the website.
Uptime Guarantee
Basically, what that uptime percent (99.9%) means is – the website will be up and running for the 99.9% of the annual time. Also; network uptime, server uptime, web server and service uptime are all included in this guarantee.
Is it server or network uptime?
It’s difficult to answer this one, as it is something that web host companies are secretive about. Here, it can be either or both …depending on the web host, itself. While reading the terms of service carefully, one can know or find out, that the uptime offered by the web host refers to the network and not the actual servers. So before signing up with any web host, ensure to make a list of what they are offering.
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Planning on how to select a website host
[...] was promised to you in the hosting company’s package. You should look into things such as the uptime, the page loading time, the bandwidth that is used and other important things that should be [...]