Uptime and monitoring a site's availability
This article is 5 years old — prices and terms may have changed.
One of the figures a site is judged by is its uptime — the period of uninterrupted operation the hosting can deliver. The figure is measured as a percentage of a given stretch of time, most often a year.
No data centre, of course, will deliver 100% uptime for a site. Sites are most often unavailable during planned work to replace hardware on the servers.
You can ask your hosting provider for their uptime; the information is usually given on the pages where hosting plans are chosen.
Practice shows that this information is not always exact or trustworthy. Let us work out what the figure affects and how to find out what it really is.
What does the uptime figure affect?
If a site is unavailable for too long, its traffic will fall critically. Visitors simply will not want to come to a site they know is often down.
A site with a low uptime figure will lose positions in the search results — a consequence of the previous point. Besides that, search robots visit the site and analyse its quality, taking uptime into account among other things.
There are other reasons why a site fails to work:
DDoS attacks. To keep attackers from deliberately overloading your site, use DDoS protection services. Host4Biz gives its clients access to Cloudflare, one of the best solutions for protecting and speeding up sites.
Not enough RAM. Many site owners use a plan with no margin. We recommend ordering hosting with RAM in reserve, so that the site can take the peak loads that sometimes run an order of magnitude above normal traffic.
Dedicated services are the better way to monitor site availability. Here is a brief look at the most popular ones.
The best services for checking uptime
Tools for checking a site's availability run regular checks at equal intervals. The services are useful not only to site owners but to web developers.
Host-tracker. A paid tool with a free plan, available for two sites with a check every half hour. Besides the free one there are 4 paid plans and the option of testing the features during a 30-day trial.
Besides uptime it monitors loading speed, whether the domain has landed on a blacklist, and the presence of SSL.
The service can send notifications through SMS, Skype and Telegram.
Pingdom — besides uptime it will check loading speed and availability from various data centres. This service runs a check every minute, and if the resource is unavailable you get a message by email.
The service has a two-week trial period.
Site24x7 — there is a 30-day trial here, after which you choose one of the plans, from 9 to 449 dollars a month. The service checks a site's overall performance, mail, whether it is on blacklists and more.
Ping-admin — besides checking uptime, there are functions for monitoring domains and checking SSL and its expiry date. The service also analyses a site for viruses and checks its link profile. You pay for each operation carried out.
Summary
Host4Biz will give your site the highest possible uptime, but it still matters to track the resource's availability. It may fail because of attacks, an overload of visitors, or a poorly chosen plan that leaves no RAM in reserve.