Almost every host advertises “99.9% uptime”. Without context it is an empty slogan. Here is how much downtime hides behind the numbers and what to check in an SLA.
How much downtime “three nines” allow
- 99% ≈ 3.65 days / year
- 99.9% ≈ 8.7 hours / year
- 99.99% ≈ 52 minutes / year
For a store, even one hour offline during a campaign can cost more than the plan price difference.
What to check in the SLA
- What is measured: network, hypervisor or your specific instance
- Whether planned maintenance counts as downtime
- How compensation works (service credit, not “sorry”)
- Whether a public status page shows incident history
Practice over promises
Read independent reviews, incident history and how the provider communicates during outages. A fast, honest status page is often more valuable than “five nines” in ads.
On hosting.racing reliability is part of the ranking alongside speed, price and support.
When choosing a provider, ask about backups, geo-redundancy and RTO/RPO. Uptime without data recovery is only half the story.
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