What is Uptime in Web Hosting? SLAs Explained
Uptime is the share of a measured period, usually a month, in which a website answers requests correctly. A 99.9% monthly target allows about 43 minutes of downtime in a 30-day month, and 99.99% about 4 minutes. WebJi®'s SLA sets a 99.9% monthly uptime target, with service credits when an eligible service misses it.
For site owners comparing hosting uptime promises, setting up their own monitoring, or preparing an SLA claim after an outage.
knowledge
- Read time
- 4 min
- Sections
- 7
- Updated
- 14 Nov 2026
- Written by
- WebJi® team
Last editorial update: 14 November 2026. Prices follow the dated sources on this page; checkout confirms current charges.
What counts as uptime and downtime?
Uptime is the share of a measured period — usually a calendar month — in which a service answers requests correctly, written as a percentage such as 99.9%. A site counts as down when the connection is refused, the request times out, DNS fails, or the server returns a 5xx error.
A slow page is not downtime under most contracts, and a maintenance window announced in advance is normally excluded. The measurement window matters as much as the number: "99.9% monthly" and "99.9% yearly" allow very different patterns of failure, which is why an SLA names the window first. To test a site from outside your own network right now, use the website availability checker.
How much downtime do 99%, 99.9% and 99.99% allow?
A 30-day month has 43,200 minutes, so 99.9% uptime allows 43.2 minutes of downtime and 99.99% allows about 4.3 minutes; over a 525,600-minute year, 99.9% allows roughly 8 hours 46 minutes.
| Uptime | Per 30-day month | Per year | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| 99% | 432 minutes (7 h 12 m) | 3.65 days | Hobby and consumer services |
| 99.9% | 43.2 minutes | 8 h 46 m | Standard hosting SLAs, including WebJi®'s target |
| 99.99% | 4.3 minutes | 52.6 minutes | Redundant, multi-server setups |
| 99.999% | 26 seconds | 5.3 minutes | Carrier and financial systems |
The arithmetic is one line: 43,200 × 0.001 = 43.2. Each extra nine cuts the allowed failure by a factor of ten, while the engineering needed to deliver it — redundant servers, failover, multiple sites — rises faster than that.
What does an uptime SLA promise and exclude?
An uptime SLA states four things — the target, the measurement window, the exclusions and the remedy — and the remedy is almost always a service credit on a future invoice, not a refund or compensation for lost sales.
- Planned maintenance: excluded when announced in advance; check the notice period the contract requires.
- Upstream failures: your own DNS provider, ISP, CDN or the visitor's network.
- Customer causes: your code, a plugin that crashes PHP, or a suspension for resource overuse.
- Force majeure: and on many contracts, large-scale DDoS attacks.
WebJi®'s hosting SLA sets a 99.9% monthly uptime target for shared, reseller, VPS and cloud services, with service credits when an eligible service misses it. The credit percentage is not printed publicly, so ask support for the current terms before relying on a figure.
How do hosts measure uptime?
Most published uptime comes from external probes that request a URL every one to five minutes from one or more locations; internal checks inside the data centre can miss routing or DNS problems visitors actually experience.
The sampling interval decides what the number can see. A five-minute probe firing at :00 and :05 misses a two-minute outage at :02 entirely, and the month still reports 100%. Ask for the probe interval and the number of locations before treating a percentage as a promise about your visitors. WebJi® publishes its incident history on the network status page.
How should you monitor your own site's uptime?
Run an independent external monitor on the pages that earn money, alert after two or three consecutive failures, and keep the log — it is the evidence an SLA claim needs.
- Pick an external monitoring service; several, such as UptimeRobot, StatusCake and Better Stack, offer free tiers with checks every few minutes.
- Monitor key pages, not just the homepage: checkout, enquiry form, login.
- Add a keyword check so a page that returns 200 but shows an error still counts as down.
- Alert after two failures so one blip does not wake you, but a real outage does.
- Send alerts to at least two people, by email and a phone app.
Free-tier limits change, so check each provider's current plan. The wider monitoring routine is in uptime monitoring.
What does downtime cost a business?
The direct cost is lost sales, estimated as monthly online revenue divided by about 720 hours; the slower costs are lost trust and, after repeated long outages, reduced crawling by search engines.
Worked example: a store taking ₹1,00,000 a month loses about ₹139 per average hour of downtime (₹1,00,000 ÷ 720), and far more if the outage hits a festival sale peak. Short outages do not remove indexed pages, but repeated 5xx responses make Googlebot slow its crawl. WebJi®'s downtime cost calculator runs the numbers for your own revenue. When the maths justifies it, the architectural answer is redundancy, explained in what is server clustering.
How do you make an uptime SLA claim?
A claim needs a timestamped record of the failure, a check that the cause is not on the exclusion list, and a ticket opened inside the window the agreement sets.
- Export the downtime log from your monitor with start and end times in a stated timezone (IST).
- Check the provider's status page for a matching incident and save a screenshot.
- Rule out your own DNS, plugin errors or a resource-limit suspension.
- Open a ticket — at WebJi®, email support@webji.services — and ask which credit the month qualifies for.
- Keep the written reply; credits normally appear on the next invoice.
Frequently asked questions
Is 100% uptime possible?
Not on a single server, because patching, hardware faults and network issues eventually interrupt service. Redundancy across several machines and locations gets close, which is what clustering and failover are for. Treat any "100% uptime guaranteed" claim with suspicion.
Does scheduled maintenance count as downtime?
Normally no, because SLAs exclude maintenance announced in advance. Check how much notice the contract requires and whether maintenance happens at night in your customers' timezone.
Is a slow website counted as down?
Usually not, unless requests time out completely. Most SLAs measure availability, not speed. Slowness is diagnosed separately; see why is my website slow.
Monthly or yearly uptime: which is better for customers?
Monthly. A yearly 99.9% allows nearly nine hours in a single bad month without breaching the agreement, while a monthly target caps each month at about 43 minutes.
Last editorial update: 15 November 2026. Prices follow the dated sources on this page; checkout confirms current charges.
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