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What is hosting uptime? Uptime refers to the amount of time that your website is up and running, available to visitors and potential clients; anything that isn’t uptime is downtime – and to oversimplify it, downtime is bad. Downtime means that people can’t reach your site which can be frustrating to potential visitors while also costing you traffic and revenue. Additionally, if people aren’t able to reach your site the first time, they may not try again. That said, hosting providers provide minimum uptime guarantees which is a guarantee that they’ll have your site up and running that percent of the total hours in a day. As a general rule, don’t work with providers who give anything less than a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Free (and paid) tools you can use There are literally dozens, if not more, of server monitoring tools available online – some are free and some costs upwards of thousands of dollars annually. Some run simple HTTP checks to confirm whether your site is running, while others perform very complex back-end jobs to monitor more than 50 checkpoints simultaneously. The various tools run every end of the spectrum, which can be a bit overwhelming to shoppers, but also ensures that there is a tool out there to fit your needs and budget. For example, free and easy tools include Uptime Robot, Monitor Us, Pingdom, and WHSR’s Uptime monitor, among others. More powerful (and in most cases, costly) tools include Nagios Uptime, Cacti, and so on.