Calculate Uptime and Downtime Table

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Gary · Posted in Affiliate Tools, Web Hosting · Comment 

I was recently on some Exchange 2010 training at work which was pretty boring but whilst I was on the course and thinking of Affiliate Marketing and the project one thing caught my attention, so I woke up and noticed a section about high availability and downtime. So I decided to do a table below showing the downtime as it was quite surprising how much downtime you could expect from your service providers or web hosting companies. Because all Affiliates will be hosting their websites and have looked at Web hosting at many points in their Affiliate business, I thought it would be useful to highlight this and recommend people consider this element when choosing their hosting package or provider. I mean I thought 99% was pretty good and our sites were going to be up pretty much all the time, well not according to this. Shocking really!!

Calculate How much downtime using the table below

Uptime Downtime per month Downtime per year
100% 0m 0m
99.999% 0.4m 5m
99.99% 4m 52m
99.9% 43m 8h46m
99.8% 1h26m 17h31m
99.7% 2h10m 1d2h17m
99.6% 2h53m 1d11h2m
99.5% 3h36m 1d19h48m
99.4% 4h19m 2d4h34m
99.3% 5h2m 2d13h19m
99.2% 5h46m 2d22h5m
99.1% 6h29m 3d6h50m
99.0% 7h12m 3d15h36m

Note: Many service providers do not count downtime caused by planned maintenance into their uptime numbers.

Can you afford to lose this amount of downtime for your websites? Our web hosting with EUKhost is currently 99.5% for both packages. So we’re currently looking at approx 2days per year downtime. I don’t think you should look for anything under 99.0% and this is why I stopped at this level in the table. If you are looking for 100% uptime then most Web hosting companies should offer this, but you might need to opt for Business Hosting solutions or dedicated servers.