All computers malfunction from time to time, whether due to software bugs, malicious attacks, hardware failure, or configuration issues.  In addition, from time to time, planned maintenance and upgrades have to be carried out on server hardware and software, which can result in your website becoming unavailable.  It is therefore impossible to keep a web server up and running 100% of the time.

How do the likes of Google and eBay manage to keep their websites running all the time then?  They use what is called a 'server farm' - a collection of many web servers which share the load of providing their services to internet users.  If there is a problem with one server, another server can take over.  Most smaller businesses cannot afford to run a server farm, as it typically costs several hundred or even thousands of pounds (or dollars) every month.

Companies such as ourselves who provide shared hosting accounts (several websites using the same server), typically offer an uptime guarantee to indicate what percentage of time their server will remain operational, and providing compensation if that target is not met.  If a company offering shared hosting also provides a "100% uptime guarantee", you must also realise that it is 100% certain that the web server will not be up and running 100% of the time!  Such guarantees invariably include a clause which says that downtime for planned maintenance does not count, and where downtime occurs for other reasons, they resign themselves to pay the relevant amount of compensation to those few customers who notice the downtime and claim on the guarantee.

Netshine do provide a 99.7% uptime guarantee as part of the hosting service level agreement, but although problems are rare, we do not wish to imply that if you host your website with us it will never go down!  When problems arise, we always do our utmost to rectify them as soon as possible.  We have a 24-hour network monitoring system in place which checks our servers every 3 minutes from 4 different locations and informs us if there is a problem.

If 24/7 availability of your website is critical to your business, we can provide an extra service called 'failover DNS'.  This service will automatically re-route visitors to a backup server in the event that the server your site is hosted on becomes unresponsive.  Click here for more details about failover DNS.