What It Is
Uptime measures how often your website is available to visitors. Its opposite, downtime, is when the site cannot be reached. Hosts often advertise uptime as a percentage, and small differences matter more than they look. A figure that sounds nearly perfect can still allow several hours of downtime in a year, depending on how many nines follow the decimal point.
Why It Matters for Your Business
When your site is down, people who search for you see an error instead of your hours, phone number or booking form. A plumber whose site is offline during a storm, when calls should be pouring in, loses work to whoever shows up next in the results. Repeated downtime can also make it harder for search engines to crawl your pages reliably.
Good to Know
Do not rely on noticing downtime yourself. Free and low-cost uptime monitoring services check your site every few minutes and email or text you if it goes offline. Keep a record of outages and compare it to what your host’s SLA promises. Planned maintenance is often excluded from uptime guarantees, so read the fine print.