The Benefits of Uptime Monitoring
Are you considering uptime monitoring, but don’t know if it will be useful enough? Well, beyond knowing when your site is up/down and being able to proactively take care of problems, you could be costing yourself money every month by not holding your web host accountable to their service level agreement, or SLA. Let’s take a closer look at what SLAs are, and how you can use a service like UptimePal to make sure that your web hosting SLA is met and your host company keeps up their end of the bargain.
Understanding a Web Hosting SLA
Most web hosts have a set level of uptime that they must meet spelled out in their service level agreement. You may recall seeing web hosts advertising things like “99.9% uptime” or other similar metrics. This metric usually means that a web host must have operational servers 99.9% of the time or more in order to meet the terms of their SLA. This is typically a selling point for web hosting because people are often looking to for the most reliable hosting that they can find. The greater the uptime number the better the service.
So, what happens if a web host falls short of this number? Well, that depends on what else is in the SLA. Sometimes SLAs can be lengthy documents, and there is often language in the agreement that specifies exactly what counts as downtime, and other various stipulations. If a web host doesn’t meet their end of the SLA, then they may offer a certain amount of money back, free services for a period of time, or other benefits. Again, this would be determined by the exact language in an SLA, so you should review yours carefully.
