Uptime is one of those numbers everyone quotes and almost nobody unpacks. You see "99.9%" on a pricing page, nod, and move on. But a percentage that high is hard to feel — it sits in a range where every host's marketing looks roughly the same.
So let's do the boring, useful thing and translate it into minutes. Then let's talk about the difference between a target and a guarantee, what monitoring actually buys you, and why we'd rather give you an honest number than an impressive-sounding one.
What the percentages really mean
The trouble with uptime figures is that all the interesting action happens in the decimal places. "99%" sounds almost the same as "99.99%," but they're worlds apart in practice. Here's the same idea in time-off-air per month, which is far easier to hold in your head.
| Uptime | Downtime per month | Downtime per year |
|---|---|---|
| 99% | ~7.3 hours | ~3.65 days |
| 99.9% | ~43 minutes | ~8.8 hours |
| 99.95% | ~22 minutes | ~4.4 hours |
| 99.99% | ~4.3 minutes | ~52 minutes |
A couple of things jump out once it's in minutes.
First, 99% is not a good number. It sounds fine. It's over seven hours of your site being unreachable every month — a full working day each quarter. When a host quotes "99%," read it as "we're comfortable with you being down for an afternoon."
Second, our 99.9% target works out to roughly 43 minutes a month in the worst allowable case. That's the ceiling we hold ourselves under, not a quota we expect to spend. Most months come in well under it, and a genuinely good month is one where the number is too boring to mention.
Target versus guarantee
This is the part a lot of pages blur on purpose, so we'll be plain about it.
A target is what we engineer toward and measure ourselves against — the line we work to stay under, every month, with the monitoring and the redundancy and the maintenance habits to back it up. Our target is 99.9%.
A guarantee is usually a financial promise: cross a threshold and you're owed a service credit. Those clauses can be reassuring, but they can also be a bit of theatre. A few minutes of credit on a $14 plan doesn't make up for your store being dark during a launch. The thing you actually want isn't a refund for downtime. It's not having the downtime.
An uptime number you can trust is worth more than one that's been rounded up for the brochure. We'd rather under-promise and quietly beat it than wave around a figure we'd have to explain away later.
So when you see "99.9% target" from us, that's deliberate wording. It's the honest version. We're telling you what we aim for and hold under, not dressing up a number we can't stand behind.
What 24/7 monitoring actually does
"24/7 monitoring" is another phrase that's easy to wave past, so here's what it buys you in practice.
- It watches so you don't have to. Your site is checked around the clock from outside, on a short interval. You shouldn't find out your site is down because a customer emailed you — you should find out because we already saw it.
- It catches the slow-motion problems. Not everything fails with a bang. Disks fill up, traffic creeps past what a config was tuned for, a certificate drifts toward expiry. Monitoring is how those get spotted while they're still small and dull, before they become an outage.
- It shortens the gap. Uptime isn't only about how rarely things break. It's about how fast they're noticed and put right. The minutes between "something's wrong" and "someone's on it" are minutes of downtime, and monitoring is how you keep that gap short.
Pair that with each site being isolated — its own space, its own PHP-FPM, walled off from its neighbours — and a noisy site next door can't drag yours down with it. A lot of reliability is just good fences.
What you control, and what you can't
Here's the honest division of labor, because not all downtime is the same kind of downtime.
We own the infrastructure layer: the server being up, the network reaching it, the web service answering, the certificate staying valid, the backups running. That's where our 99.9% target lives, and it's the part we monitor and maintain so you don't have to think about it.
But a site can be perfectly "up" at the server and still broken for visitors. A few things that live on your side of the line:
- A bad plugin or theme update. The server's fine; the site throws an error because something in WordPress didn't like the new version. This is exactly what backups are for — restore from a backup and you're back in minutes.
- A domain or DNS misstep. If a domain's records point the wrong way, the site is unreachable even though it's running happily. When your domain is registered through us, DNS is handled automatically, which removes a whole category of self-inflicted outages.
- A traffic spike you didn't plan for. A post goes big and suddenly you need the headroom of a larger plan. That's a happy problem, and it's a plan change, not an outage in the usual sense.
None of this is meant to pass the buck. It's meant to be honest about where the line is — because knowing which side a problem lives on is how you fix it quickly instead of refreshing the page and hoping.
A calmer way to read the number
So here's the calm version. Uptime isn't a trophy to wave around; it's a quiet promise to keep. Ours is a 99.9% target, backed by 24/7 monitoring and site isolation, and most months it's comfortably better — boring, in the good way. If you'd like the gentler take on the same idea, backups you'll never need is the companion to this one.
Every plan rides the same monitored, isolated infrastructure, and every plan comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee — so you can settle in and judge the quiet for yourself. See the plans when you're ready, or send us a note if you'd like to talk reliability before you commit.