What is Uptime, How to Calculate Uptime Rate?

What is Uptime, How to Calculate Uptime Rate?
In today’s world, having a website that is always up and running is more important than ever. This increases the importance of website uptime for your customers day by day.

So what exactly is uptime?

What is Uptime?
Uptime is a metric observed by businesses of all sizes to better understand the overall reliability of a system. It is calculated by dividing the time the services are online by the total active availability.

In the hosting industry, uptime is used to express how long a hosting system works uninterruptedly. Ideally the uptime is 100% (i.e. zero downtime) but this is extremely difficult to achieve in the real world.

In a nutshell, uptime is the number of hours a server is running and available, i.e. the inverse of downtime.

What Does Uptime Do?
Uptime is important to your website visitors because it means your hosting service is available. If your site is not available, it will have a negative impact on your business. If customers and potential customers can’t see your website, it means you could lose your sales to your competitors. Also, if your website is down for too long, Google will think your website is unreliable and this will negatively affect your ranking.

How to Calculate Uptime Rate?
Uptime is calculated based on the number of hours the system (server) is available for a given period of time and is expressed as a percentage.

For example, the annual working time is calculated as follows:

Number of Hours (Working Time) / Number of Hours per Year X 100

For your better understanding, let’s explain this formula through an example. We know that there are 365 days in a year, so there are a total of 365 x 24 = 8760 hours in hours.

So if there are 4 hours of downtime per year, that means there are 8756 uptimes (i.e. 8760 hours minus 4 hours of downtime). In summary, the calculation will be as follows:

(8756 / 8760) x 100 = 99.95%

So in this case, the uptime is 99.95%.

Applications You Can Track Uptime Status Of Your Website
While website usability is the most critical part of a business, you cannot do this by constantly looking at the monitor. Therefore, there are some applications where you can monitor the uptime status.

Below is a list of applications where you can monitor uptime:

1. Uptrends
Uptrends monitors your website from multiple locations and notifies you via email whenever there is an outage.

It offers a nice dashboard where you can see various key metrics of your site.

Availability table
Error breakdown by types
Total time taken to load chart
You can customize the clipboard as you wish. It also gives you the option to export the data as PDF or Excel. You can use Uptrends for free.

Starter plan: $16.21/month

2. Dotcom-Monitor
Dotcom-Monitor makes it easy to check the performance, functionality and uptime of websites, web applications, servers, APIs and more.

Dotcom-Monitor helps you quickly identify where performance issues originate with a full suite of enterprise-class tools and over 25 global monitoring tools. It provides monitoring as often as 1 minute and allows you to be notified of your site quickly with text, email or phone alerts. It can be used free for 30 days.

Starter plan: $17.95/month

3. StatusCake
StatusCake is a great app that has been around since 2012 and is used to monitor not only your website’s availability but also its performance.

The user base includes both small businesses benefiting from the feature-rich free plan and large businesses benefiting from advanced features and testing limits. Free trials are available on all paid plans that don’t require a credit card or commitment.

Some of the features of StatusCake are as follows:

Uptime monitoring – HTTP, TCP, SSH, DNS, SMTP, PING & PUSH
Instant and Reliable Alerts – Email, SMS and Slack; Third-party apps like Telegram and Discord
Problem source analysis
Page Speed ​​Monitoring
SSL Monitoring
Domain Name Tracking
Server Monitoring
Virus Scan
Starter plan: $20.41 per month

4. Sematext
Sematext Synthetics has powerful monitors that help monitor website and API availability from designated checkpoints around the world to minimize downtime and MTTR. Controls can be customized to run at any time, from one minute to one hour.

Sematext detects all changes in performance, monitors key web values, network timing, performance of third-party APIs, and SSL certificates to provide end-to-end visibility. If something goes wrong; It allows you to receive instant notifications through a number of channels such as email, Slack, VictorOps, Twilio, private notification.

Sematext Synthetics comes with a free trial version.

Starter plan: $9 per month

5. Uptime Robot
Uptime Robot provides free monitoring of up to 50 sites with a 5-minute check. Uptime Robot also helps you monitor the port, which means you can get notifications when services like FTP, SMTP, POP3 and IMAP or custom port goes down.

It has an app available for iOS and Android and provides free online uptime monitoring.

With the free plan, you can monitor up to 50 URLs, check the content of a website (using the keyword tracker), ping your server, or monitor your ports at 5-minute intervals. You can create a status sheet to show your working time.

With the Pro Plan, you get various features such as more monitors, unlimited status pages that you can customize at 1-minute intervals, sharing announcements that your customers can subscribe to on your status page, and monitoring SSL certificates.

Starter plan: $7/month

6. Sites24x7
Sites24x7 is a simple website monitoring tool to track the availability of your website or web application. It tests your uptime in various global locations such as Singapore, the Netherlands, and New Jersey, ensuring that your website is serving optimal page load times in major regions of the world.

Starter plan: $9/month (annual payments)

The Importance of Uptime Tracking for Your Website
Uptime tracking provides an accurate picture of how your website is performing in terms of usability. In other words, uptime monitoring tells you if your website is up and running at any given time. This information is necessary for anyone who trusts websites for business or other important purposes.

You can also identify the sources of issues affecting your site’s usability with uptime monitoring. That is, you can check if a website is up and running at any given time, and see if there is a problem with your hosting provider or hardware.

The third benefit of uptime monitoring is that it helps you focus resources to prevent future downtime. Uptime monitoring identifies potential weak spots on your website, allowing you to take steps to prevent future outages.

Uptime is especially important when working on an important project or paying bills online. It’s never acceptable for a website to crash in the middle of a big purchase.

There are many factors that can affect uptime. One of the most common causes of downtime is hardware failure. This can include anything from a hard drive crash to an issue with the power supply. Other causes of downtime include software problems, viruses, network problems, and human error.

The Importance of Uptime Tracking for SEO
If your uptime is bad, all your SEO efforts may also go to waste and you may lose customers to the competition. Because uptime is one of the most important factors when ranking Google websites.

When Googlebot indexes websites, it adds them to its normal crawl. This means that Google will regularly test the load times of the pages on your site. The more popular the site is, the more often Google crawls it. If many pages or entire sites are often unavailable or extremely slow, Google will consider it unreliable and you will lose your ranking. If your site is still not working after several crawl attempts, Google will remove you from its index. In this case, you need to reconfigure your SEO efforts as you go up against your competitors and lose customers.