I'm curious to know what others consider good uptime from their webhost? I monitor my site and it seems that I have a lot of (unscheduled) downtime but I want to know if I am justified about e-mailing my host about it. I certainly receive a lot of e-mails/ICQs from my members when the site is down & I often find that it is slow or down myself when I log in. :(

I don't expect 100% uptime but these days it seems that I am down more than I am up..... not good for a (new) small but growing community!

What do most of you average for uptime in a week/month or what do you think is a reasonable percentage to want in a host??

99.5% + is a good uptime figure. Ok, if the host will be moving servers, or similar etc., and they warn you in advance, the figure may be lower, and acceptable in this case, but on average 99.5% plus is what you should expect per month.

I have a site with FastHosts purely for testing services, and it struggles to reach 60 - 70% uptime each month. It's appalling.

*note to self - avoid FastHosts!*

Hi!
Anything over 95 percent is good. But the most important thing I feel is that is the at any instant of time the site should not be down for more than a few minutes.
I'll put it this way. 99% means in 100 days 1 day can be down. Image you are X'mas site and Oct,Nov, december the site is down only for one day between 15th and 25th...Think how much your sales would be affected.... But the host can proudly say that we have given 99% uptime... It doesn't matter to you that time...

At the same time suppose you have a 5 minute reboot every 5 days... It's doesn't matter many of us would not even notice it..
So I'd always suggest a host who has more stable servers with short downtime periods if any... Also the host must always do upgrades shifts during the non peak hours...

Have a great day :)

Regards
Amar

caffeine, if you've been able to verify that your site was actually inaccessible to most of the Internet during the times you were monitoring it, you should send those stats to your web host and see what they say. But does your host offer an uptime guarantee?

We have the problem where several users using a "free monitoring" service will report down time to us and it's totally incorrect. We shouldn't have to show them in their log files where people were actually accessisng their site during that "downtime".

You need to verify the data on your own, before you present it to your host. More than likely they will be aware of any downtime, you should just be asking why you weren't notified of it.

I would expect nothing less than a 99.9% uptime, but it really depends on what you're paying and what they're guaranteeing for that price. IMHO.