Uptime Guarantees Explained

These days, most web hosting providers offer an uptime guarantee as part of their marketing strategy and Service Level Agreement (SLA) to promote the uptime, performance, and reliability of their systems. As well they should; uptime is fundamental to a site’s success. A website can be impeccably designed, captivating, and user-friendly, but if users can’t actually use that site, it’s all for nothing.

Every business depends on accurate uptime guarantees when choosing the right hosting provider for their needs. We decided to look at uptime guarantees, how the industry uses them, and how we at amazee.io, with our spirit of transparency, handle uptime guarantees differently than most.

Hosting providers typically offer uptime guarantees varying anywhere from 99 percent to 99.99 percent, with some providers offering even higher percentages. Though the difference between those numbers may seem insignificant, some quick math shows that each figure equals a vastly different amount of downtime for your site. For instance, over a one-month period, the total downtime for a 99 percent guarantee versus a 99.9 percent guarantee can be the difference between 7 hours of downtime and 43 minutes of downtime. While that is a huge difference in downtime for your site, the excessive cost of implementing the strategies which enable such minimal downtime isn’t always the best choice for your company’s needs, demographics, or budget.

Recognizing this aspect of the business, amazee.io offers two different SLA tiers for hosting: standard and high availability. Included in these offerings are two different uptime guarantees for the diverse needs of our clients and their users. For clients that require their site to be highly available, we offer a 99.9 percent monthly uptime guarantee. This tier is reliant on multiple availability zone redundancy, ensuring that downtime is minimal. Clients with less demanding uptime needs can choose standard availability with our 99.5 percent option.

In addition, amazee.io has a tiered rebate policy for the rare times we don’t meet these SLAs, offering a 10% credit on your bill for every tenth of a percent of your uptime guarantee which is not met, up to a maximum of a 100% bill credit should your site’s uptime fall a full percentage point or more below the guaranteed uptime percentage.

So, why doesn’t amazee.io offer a 99.99 or 99.999 percent uptime guarantee like some of our competitors do? The reason is simple — it’s honesty. Nobody can really provide a 99.999 percent uptime, because that amounts to only 26 seconds of downtime per month, which is almost not measurable. Some hosting companies offer these impossible uptime guarantees as a sales tactic, even though they know they will never be able to provide that level of service. And their cost planning reflects this by including cases that receive rebates regularly.

At amazee.io, we don’t do this. We offer 99.9 and 99.5 percent uptimes because we know we can guarantee those numbers. In a decade of hosting, we only had 1 case where we went under 99.5 percent and only 2 cases where we went below 99.9 percent.

We stand behind our numbers. We know that our customers place a huge amount of trust in our services and we return that trust with honesty and transparency.

To learn more about the advantages of our uptime guarantee policies visit our site or drop us an email. We’re happy to answer any questions you might have.