Ever notice how Amazon almost never goes down? Yet somehow, smaller business websites seem to crash at the worst possible moments. After years of monitoring WordPress sites, I’ve learned why – and it’s not what most hosting companies tell you.
Here’s what drives me crazy: Most hosting companies claim “99.9% uptime!” but they’re just pinging their own servers internally. That’s like asking your teenager if they cleaned their room – you probably want to check for yourself.
Let me show you what that uptime percentage actually means in downtime:
- 99.9% = Your site is down for almost 9 hours per year
- 99.99% = About 52 minutes of downtime per year
- 99.999% = Just 5 minutes yearly
With my Complete Care and Premium Care plans, I aim for 99.99% uptime by using external monitoring that checks your site every minute. Not just pinging the server, but actually verifying your content loads. Because what good is a website if customers can’t see it?
Recently, a client came to me after losing a full day of Black Friday sales. Their host claimed 99.9% uptime, but nobody noticed their checkout page was broken for hours. That’s exactly why I don’t just monitor uptime – I check that your critical pages actually work.
Look, even Google isn’t up 100% of the time. But the difference between 99.9% and 99.99% uptime could mean thousands in lost sales and frustrated customers. Plus, Google actually considers reliability when ranking sites – frequent downtime can hurt your SEO for months.
You don’t need to obsess over uptime monitoring. That’s my job. But you do need someone watching your site with tools that actually work, not just accepting what your host claims. Because in e-commerce, every minute of downtime is a minute you’re losing money.