In web hosting, uptime means the percentage of time your website is online and reachable for visitors during a given period (usually a month).
Think of it as your site’s “open for business” time. If your host advertises 99.9% uptime, they’re saying that, over the measurement window, your server should be available almost all the time, with a small amount of downtime allowed. Downtime is any period when your site can’t be accessed or returns errors (like 500 or 503) from a visitor’s point of view.
How uptime is calculated
Uptime is typically calculated as: (total time minus downtime) divided by total time, then multiplied by 100. Hosting companies and monitoring tools usually report uptime monthly because most hosting SLAs are written around monthly availability. If you want hosting that’s monitored and maintained for you, our WordPress hosting service is built around keeping sites available, updated, and recoverable when something breaks.
| Uptime level | Max downtime per 30-day month (approx.) | Max downtime per 365-day year (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| 99% | 7 hours 12 minutes | 3 days 15 hours 36 minutes |
| 99.9% | 43 minutes | 8 hours 46 minutes |
| 99.95% | 22 minutes | 4 hours 23 minutes |
| 99.99% | 4 minutes | 53 minutes |
That table is why the decimals matter. Going from 99% to 99.9% is not a small change, it’s a big drop in allowable downtime. For a busy Orlando dental office, law firm, or pest control company, even a short outage during business hours can mean missed calls, failed form submissions, and paid ad traffic landing on an error page.
What uptime guarantees usually do (and don’t) cover
Many hosts put an uptime guarantee inside a Service Level Agreement (SLA). If they miss it, you may get a credit, not a refund. The fine print often excludes things like scheduled maintenance windows, your own site changes (plugin conflicts, broken code), traffic spikes that exceed plan limits, and “force majeure” events. In Florida, that last one matters because storms can trigger regional network or power issues that a provider may classify as outside their control.
Uptime vs speed
A site can have great uptime and still feel broken if it loads slowly. Visitors do not care whether the server is technically “up” if the page spins for 10 seconds and they bounce. If you want the practical side of this, our FAQ on how website speed affects SEO explains why slow sites lose leads and visibility even without full outages.
How to check your uptime like a business owner
We recommend three simple checks: (1) use an external uptime monitor that pings your site from outside your network and alerts you by text or email, (2) review your host’s status page and SLA language so you know what counts as downtime, and (3) look in Google Search Console for crawling or server availability issues if you’re seeing sudden drops in traffic or indexing. If you’re also trying to diagnose slowdowns that look like downtime to customers, our FAQ on why websites load slow pairs well with uptime monitoring.
If you tell us what platform you’re on (WordPress, Shopify, custom) and how you get leads (calls, forms, bookings), we can recommend an uptime target and a monitoring setup that matches how your business actually makes money, and if needed we can handle the build side through our web design team so your site stays stable under updates and traffic.
