A good hosting provider should offer at least a 99.9% uptime SLA for most small business websites, and 99.99% if your site takes payments, bookings, or time-sensitive lead forms.
Uptime sounds like a tiny difference on paper, but the math is what matters. “99.9%” still allows roughly three quarters of an hour of downtime in a 30-day month, which can easily land during peak call volume. If you run a dental office, law firm, or home service company in Orlando, downtime during lunch, after-work hours, or during a storm-heavy week can mean missed calls, abandoned forms, and lost trust.
| Uptime SLA | Approx. downtime per 30-day month | Approx. downtime per year |
|---|---|---|
| 99.9% | 43 minutes | 8.8 hours |
| 99.95% | 22 minutes | 4.4 hours |
| 99.99% | 4 minutes | 53 minutes |
| 99.999% | 26 seconds | 5 minutes |
When you compare providers, don’t stop at the headline percentage. Ask what the SLA actually covers: is it only the network, or does it include the server, storage, and database your WordPress site relies on? Also ask how uptime is measured (provider monitoring vs. independent checks), what “scheduled maintenance” exclusions look like, and what you get if they miss the SLA (service credits are common, but credits do not recover lost leads).
If you want a hosting setup that’s built for business reliability (not hobby sites), our WordPress hosting service focuses on stability, backups, security hardening, and support that understands how local business sites break in the real world.
In Florida, weather adds another layer. A single-region setup can get hit by power, fiber, or regional network issues during tropical systems. Look for offsite backups, a CDN, and a plan for restoration if the worst happens. For mission-critical sites, multi-region redundancy and clear recovery targets (how much data you could lose and how fast the site can come back) matter more than marketing claims.
Here’s a quick screen you can use when a provider says “we offer 99.9% uptime”:
- Clear SLA in writing (not just a sales page)
- Defined maintenance windows and how they notify you
- Daily backups with one-click restore and offsite storage
- Security basics: SSL support, firewall/WAF option, malware scanning
- Support you can reach fast when your site is down
Uptime and speed also tie directly to how users and search engines experience your site, so it’s worth pairing hosting decisions with how site speed affects SEO if you’re trying to grow local search traffic.
If you’re rebuilding or moving to a new platform, hosting is only half the equation; a clean build reduces crashes, plugin conflicts, and slowdowns, which is why our web design work includes performance-minded setup instead of a “pretty only” site.
If you want, tell us what your site does (brochure site, booking, ecommerce, membership, high-traffic ads) and we’ll point you to the uptime level and hosting features that fit how your business actually makes money.
