One of the most important metrics to gauge the level of service provided by a web hosting company is to see the uptime it offers. It is recommended by the experts of the …
One of the most important metrics to gauge the level of service provided by a web hosting company is to see the uptime it offers. It is recommended by the experts of the industry that you look for nothing less than 99.99% uptime. A little calculation of the downtime percentage in terms of hours, days, months and years can give you a bigger picture of how much even 1% matters when it comes to down/uptime. If a web host says they can offer a 98% uptime, you are recommended to steer clear of that web host. Here are the top 5 reasons why your hosting company must offer 99.99% uptime.
Every Percentage Point Matters
As mentioned above, even a 0.1% of downtime can prove to be big for companies when you calculate that downtime over a year’s period. For example, if your web host says they offer an unbelievable uptime of 98% through their most reliable and high-tech servers, they are actually talking about 28.8 minutes of downtime on a daily basis. Calculate that over a span of 12 months (1 year) and your website will be down for your visitors for more than a week. When you are running a serious business, you would not want your website down even for a day in a whole year, let alone 1 week.
It’s Not Just Time
It would be unfair to calculate the downtime or uptime only in terms of time. Take a look at the numbers from a different angle and you will know some more eye-opening details. A medium sized business that makes $1000 worth of sales on a daily basis will lose more than $7000 in a year with 98% downtime. These calculations are only valid if your web host is telling you the uptime honestly. What if the website is down for 10 days in a year? That would translate to $10,000 worth of loss every year. The money that you are paying for the promised 98% uptime will also go into loss.
It Hurts Your Rankings
Can your website’s uptime and downtime really hurt your rankings on search engines? Of course, anything that keeps visitors from staying on your website for long will have a negative effect on your SEO ranking. For example, Google would rank a website down if it notices visitors bouncing off of its pages within 1 or 2 seconds. Google assumes that the website does not offer informative content which is leading to such high bounce rate. No matter how small or subtle the impact is, there is no denying to the fact that it can hurt your rankings on search engines of your website is down for 10 days every year.
It Hurts Your Brand Image
Why won’t downtime hurt your brand image? Since your website is a representative of your brand in the online world, its downtime will directly hurt your brand image? When you are turning into a brand, your customers start taking you really seriously. They expect you to be professionals and experts of what you do. It will hurt their image of your brand if they come to your website and find an error message in their faces. Imagine how irritating it will be for you if Facebook or YouTube were down for that long. This is going to hurt brands as big as Facebook and YouTube too.
It Tells How Good Your Web Host Is
The choice of a web hosting company depends greatly how dependable it is. A web host becomes reliable with not just good hardware but software and customer service too. 2% downtime every year is a great indicator of the quality of maintenance and hardware that your web host is investing in. Whether it’s bad hardware or inferior maintenance that’s causing a 2% downtime every year, this will translate into loss for your company anyway.