Table of Contents
How is uptime measured?
You can calculate uptime by dividing operational system times versus measured periods; after doing that, multiply the result by 100 and you’ll get a percentage.
Downtime incidents are typically logged by monitoring tools/services, which also have a responsibility to track whether a system is available. If you want to improve uptime reporting accuracy, you should look at documents and logs related to these.
Tools for measuring uptime: StatusCake and UptimeRobot are two examples of tools/services you can use to measure system uptime.
What is considered good uptime?
99.9% is generally considered “good” uptime across different industries. If you measure system availability over an entire year, you effectively have an allowance of 8 hours and 45 minutes (but of course, you should still aim to use as little of this as possible).
While 99.9% is considered an acceptable level, many businesses aim for higher uptime as this. 99.99% is often cited as something to aim for, and you’ll also hear “four nines” mentioned. Uptime guarantees normally vary depending on the pricing tier you choose, with enterprise-level ones aiming for a higher percentage.
How can I improve my system’s uptime?
Some of the ways you can boost your system’s uptime include:
- Redundancy with backup systems and components to ensure that disruption is minimal.
- Monitor your infrastructure and address issues as soon as you detect them, ideally before they become a major problem. Consider the use of monitoring tools for this.
- Perform regular maintenance to stop software from developing bugs or becoming less functional. Releasing frequent updates/patches might be something to consider.
- Load-balance traffic across multiple servers, rather than putting all of your eggs in one basket.
- Have a disaster recovery plan in place to ensure that downtime is minimal and doesn’t cause follow-on issues.
Conclusion
You must focus on uptime when offering any online service and using different systems. Customer satisfaction largely relies on your service being readily available and aiming for a minimum of 99.9% uptime is imperative.
Since even a few minutes of downtime can harm your business and its reputation, it’s worth looking for the right hosting provider from the very start. Carefully assess SLAs and think about what the provider is doing to mitigate the risk of downtime. A proactive approach to identifying and resolving errors in your systems can minimize their eventual impact and safeguard against major disruptions.
