We’re sure that if you’ve ever searched for web hosting you will have been bombarded with offers and advertisements declaring ‘100% uptime’, ‘100% uptime guarantee’ or ‘100% uptime SLA’ (Service Level Agreement). So, is it possible? Well there’s no easy way to answer this – it truly is both yes and no.
Yes, it is possible to achieve 100% uptime over a specific period of time. However….
No, it is not possible to be truthful and offer any form of guarantee or service level agreement with a 100% uptime rating.
Why is this? Well, there isn’t a single web host in existence that has had 100% uptime for their customers servers. Not one. And if they try to tell you that they have, they’re simply being dishonest. Yes, it might sound like a great sales pitch, but seeing ‘100% uptime’ should make you very skeptical about the rest of the things that the company is claiming for their web hosting.
For the reason that it is impossible to offer an 100% uptime guarantee or SLA, you will not find any such claims or references on any of DPS Computing’s web hosting packages. We believe wholeheartedly in honesty and transparency with our customers.
Does the mean to say that 100% uptime is impossible? No, of course not. While 100% uptime cannot be guaranteed by anyone, good hosts do have (sometimes long) periods of 100% uptime on their customer servers. For example, DPS Computing’s web hosting customer servers have had 100% uptime for the previous 12 days and 100% uptime is most definitely something for any good web host to aspire to.
So, why do some web hosts claim 100% uptime? Well you’ll no doubt see many web hosts (including big web hosting companies) offering 100% uptime guarantees. Quite simply it’s a marketing ploy. It is not possible – and is extremely unlikely (dare we say impossible!) that this will be possible for many many decades. Everyone likes the idea of 100% uptime and it sounds good, so some web hosting companies advertise this in an effort to gain more customers.
However, it does make you wonder, if a web host makes an impossible claim about their uptime, what other things are they misrepresenting?
You’ll usually find that you will have a much better experience (and in most cases, more uptime) with a web host that is being honest about what they can realistically offer you for an uptime percentage / uptime service level agreement (SLA).
