Server Up time Vs Network Up Time [Hosting]

Imagine if you have good number of sponsors and high traffic for your blog, one day your loyal customers visit your website and find it inaccessible, what would they think of your site? You would lose huge traffic, business and Search Engine Ranking.
A serious blogger needs to select reliable web host, providing state of art services to their clients. We consider many factors while selecting the web host. One important factor that we may ignore or pay less attention to it is the server up time.
Today in this article we are going to unveil the reality of server up time, network uptime and its myth.
What is Server Uptime:-
Server uptime is the time throughout the month, when server is able to process the all traffic requests. If you are looking for some site and it is not responding, it means either server is partially down or completely not responding.
Providing 100% uptime for server is difficult but not impossible. One has to hire highly skilled staff and deploy good infrastructure to achieve 100 percent up time.
Web Hosts’ Claim- A Hidden Reality:-
Before finalizing the webhost selection, please do inquire their uptime. Industry standards for server uptime are 99.99%, while some companies are providing 100% uptime. Don’t go for anything below this. Server maintenance and update is such a factor which can’t be avoided and this is the case with every webhost. But with proper planning and management, webhost can curtail this maintenance time.
If we calculate the industry standard up time, it means that;
Total number of minutes in a month x (100-uptime%)/100
= (30days x 24hours) x 60min x (100-99.5)/100
= 43200 x (0.5)/100
= 216 minutes (max downtime).
What about figures below than industry standard uptime like 99% and 98.5% up time? You would have unbearable loss in terms of business and traffic.
Can you afford this much down time? Answer is no. Do remember that high speed network and stable server time is also considered in Google Page Rank.
Some webhost play dirty game and use jugglery of words. They confuse their customers and claim in their SLA (Service level agreement) that they are guaranteeing 100% network up time. Don’t confuse the “Server Uptime” and “Network Uptime” terminologies.
What is Network Up Time?
Network uptime means that their network (Lan, Wan) will be up all time despite the fact that one of their server in network is down. Because they committed for network up time not the server uptime. So when you talk to them they will reply you with the reality that they haven’t committed the server uptime.
Some host even clarifies the situation that network maintenance will be included in this down time or they will take some extra time for this issue.
Before selecting any host for your blog or website do check their server uptime from WebHostingStuff;  monitored for at least six months and then analyze their previous trend towards their commitment. If they have occasional down time which may occur due to reboot, security patch or some update, and consistent up time then it’s ok to go with them – otherwise keep hunting for another good host.