
When hiring any hosting plan, there is always an indicator present: server uptime. Usually in percentages, like 99%, 99.5%, and 99.9%, it is extremely important and should not be underestimated.
However, few people know what these numbers really mean and what their impact on applications is. If this is also your case, follow the article below, as we will explain in detail what server uptime is, how it is measured and how important it is for your business. Come on?
What is server uptime?
Uptime is an English word that can be translated as “uptime”. In the IT area, this term is used to refer to the time in which a computer or system is active, working normally.
Thus, server uptime is the time in which the server is up, available to the administrators of the hosted applications and their external users, such as, for example, visitors to a website. This is when all server functions are working normally and allow applications to work in the same way.
On the other hand, when the server is not available or is unstable, making access impossible, we say that it is experiencing downtime.
Most hosting companies currently offer a server uptime of over 99%. Most of them offer up to 99.5% and some even provide 99.8% uptime, as is the case with Host One.
But what does that mean exactly? How is this percentage calculated? That’s what you find out in the next topic!
How is uptime measured?
As we’ve seen, server uptime is always measured in percentage, such as 99%, 99.5%, or even 99.999%. But what do these numbers mean exactly? The uptime calculation is mostly done over a period of one year.
Since a year has 8,544 hours, simply multiply this value by the percentage and divide by one hundred. Thus, a server with 99.8% uptime, as is the case with Hoste One, will be available for 8,526,912 hours, or more than 364 days a year.
If we want more approximate numbers, in a monthly period, we can divide these values found by 12. In this way, we find that this same server will have an uptime of about 710 hours or more than 29 days during a month; and a downtime of 1 hour in the same period.
However, it is important to note that this downtime will not always happen, as it may happen that the uptime period is shorter during a given month. Still, this does not mean that the server will be unavailable for an hour at a time. But yes, adding all the downtime periods together, it will be unavailable for about an hour within 30 days.
The importance of server uptime for your business
Server uptime is one of the most underestimated points by anyone who is going to hire a hosting plan . Most are satisfied with 99% and do not understand the impact this number can have on their business, especially when we are talking about robust applications.
However, you have to keep in mind that uptime is extremely important for any internet business. From small sites to gigantic e-commerces, 1% of downtime can mean gigantic losses, both financial and image.
Below, you can see three reasons why Uptime can be so important for your business and why you should always get the most out of this indicator. Keep following!
financial losses
The main and biggest impact of server uptime for a business is the revenue generated. That’s because it directly depends on server availability for administrators and users. Thus, any period of downtime results in financial losses.
But can 1% downtime cost that much? Yea! And to understand how this happens, we can take as an example a medium-sized e-commerce hosted on a server with 99% uptime.
With that, it will be down, on average, for 85 hours during a year, as we saw in the calculation above. If this e-commerce earns BRL 2,000.00 per day, that is, BRL 83.3 per hour, the loss that the downtime will cause will be BRL 7,080 during the year.
It may seem little, but for a more robust application, with much higher daily billing, 85 hours of unavailability can mean hundreds of thousands of reais lost.
Another serious consequence of downtime is the image damage caused to the application’s external users. A virtual store that is often offline, for example, will never be able to win and retain customers. Therefore, it will not be able to grow and stand out in the market.
For other applications, such as ERP systems , where availability is a critical factor, this loss is even greater and can mean the death or survival of the company in the market.
And the consequences of downtime don’t stop there. Because, for applications that need to capture organic traffic through Google and other search engines, there is still a loss in ranking on search results pages. That’s because availability is a crucial factor for ranking in any search engine.