Software Development:
Individual Programming

Symptom

Web hosting providers often guarantee 99 % uptime. Bitpalace advertise a typical uptime of 99.9 %. This article shall help you to develope a better understanding, what these numbers rally mean and what a realistic expectation to the availability of a web space account is.

Solution

Webspace users often have the wrong idea that webspace can and should always be available. According to the present state of the art, this is impossible. Errors and long-running offline times with large, well-known Internet brands and telecommunication providers prove that even with enormous technical expenditure and billions investments no permanent availability of server services can be guaranteed.

Server availability at Bitpalace is very high. Typically higher than 99.9 %. In concrete terms, however, this means that a server is not available almost nine hours a year:

365 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes = 525,600 minutes
100 % - 99.9 % = 0.1 % maximum downtime
0.1 % of 525,600 minutes = 525.6 minutes = 8.76 hours

In the 99.9 %, advertised by Bitpalace, planned nightly maintenance work and unexpected failures due to technical errors are both included. Even with the very high availability of 99.9 % is unlikely, but it is possible that a web space is not online for almost a whole working day. It is even possible that a failure will last even longer, because the value is an average value.

For comparison, many other providers call for less availability of e.g. 99.5 % (corresponds to 1 full day and 2 hours) or even 99 % (corresponds to 3 full days and 15 hours).

In practice, failures are very rare at Bitpalace. Most servers run almost uninterrupted for years. Failures are limited to a few minutes, sometimes even a few seconds. The actual downtime is significantly lower than the typical, expected downtime. Short-term disturbances are also very rarely noticed by users, because visitors do not always surf on a website. A website with e.g. 100 visitors a day (3000 a month) is only called once per quarter hour. If there is a server failure in the meantime, the failure in practice does not have any effect, because there is no one to retrieve the page right now.

Overview of frequently asked questions