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Website uptime is a measure of the time which a website has been “up” and available
for web requests from users. The term ‘Site uptime’ is relatively new, it has been
in popular usage for the last 10 to 15 years. ‘Site Uptime’ was invented to describe
the opposite of downtime, which is the amount of time which a site is unavailable
to users.
Modern web server, network infrastructure and site monitoring technologies have
drastically reduced site downtime. This reduction in downtime has made the term
‘site uptime’ a more verbose method to describe website availability and performance.
v Website uptime is typically represented as a percentage, for example ’99.99%’.
Site uptime is sometimes displayed as ‘nines’, i.e. ‘4 nines’ or ‘5 nines’ representing
’99.99%’ and ’99.999%’ respectively. The later ‘nines’ method is generally used
by the tech-type personal such as network engineers and datacenter operators.
Here is a chart on site uptime…
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Availability
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Per Day
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Per Month
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Per Year
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99.9999%
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0.09 sec
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2.6 sec
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31 sec
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99.999%
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0.9 sec
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26 sec
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5 min 16 sec
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99.99%
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1 min, 26 sec
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43 min, 50 sec
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8 hr, 45 min, 57 sec
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99%
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14 min, 24 sec
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7 hr, 18 min, 17 sec
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87 hr, 39 min, 30 sec
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As you can see from the chart above, high availability of your website is a very
important subject to address. Even at 99.9% uptime your site may be down for an
entire 8 hour period, if this occurs during normal business hours it turns out to
be an entire day of site downtime. During this downtime you are loosing potential
sales and denying current customers access to their important information.
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