Website Uptime Guarantees Explained

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

What Does a Website Uptime Guarantee Mean?

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

Hosting providers typically offer website uptime guarantees varying from 99 percent to 99.99 percent, with some 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 website 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 is the difference between 7 hours of website downtime and 43 minutes of downtime. While that is a massive difference-, the high cost of implementing the strategies that enable such minimal website downtime isn’t always the best choice for your company’s needs, demographics, or budget.

Recognizing the significant business impact this has, amazee.io offers different Service Level Agreements (SLA) hosting tiers for our website uptime guarantees. For amazee.io Cloud and amazee.io Dedicated Cloud, we offer the following tiers: 

• 99.9% website uptime guaranteed
• 99.95% website uptime guaranteed
• 99.99% website uptime guaranteed

These availability options cover three different uptime guarantees for the diverse needs of our clients and their projects. Clients with industry-standard uptime requirements can choose between our two SLA tiers with corresponding availability guarantees of 99.9 and 99.95 percent.

For clients that require their site to be ultra-available, we offer a 99.99 percent uptime guarantee option. This option requires the use of the amazee.io CDN, as well as the tuning of both the infrastructure and the application in collaboration with an amazee.io Technical Account Manager and the amazee.io Platform Team.

Finally, we also offer a multi-cloud failover strategy for ultra-high availability requirements, which can be blended with the other availability tiers. This option relies on multiple availability zone redundancies, ensuring absolute website downtime even when an entire infrastructure provider goes offline.

In addition, amazee.io has a tiered rebate policy for the rare times we don’t meet these SLAs, offering a 5% credit on your bill for every percent of your uptime guarantee that is not met, up to a maximum of 50% credit. We apply any rebates resulting from not meeting the SLAs on the monthly fee for Hosting Services of the affected instance

Website Uptime of 99.999%

So, why doesn’t amazee.io offer a 99.999 percent or more website uptime guarantee like some competitors? The reason is simple — it’s honesty. Nobody can realistically provide 99.999 percent uptime as this 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. Accordingly, their cost planning reflects this by including cases that receive rebates regularly.

Additionally, many hosting providers don’t offer uptime guarantees anymore. They offer what is called “expected uptimes” as a way to work around the challenges that uptime guarantees can pose. At amazee.io, we don’t do this. We offer 99.9, 99.95, and up to 99.99 percent uptimes because we know we can guarantee those numbers. We are aware that our customers place tremendous trust in our services, and we return that trust with honesty and transparency.

If you want to learn more about our website uptime guarantees and our ZeroOps, fully open source application delivery and hosting platform, schedule a meeting with us today. We’d love to chat.