Network uptime is talking about the availability of the network, which including the network within the data center and the connection out to the Internet. Network is usually very stable, so a lot of web hosting service providers would like to give you a guarantee on it.

So, based on above definition, you can see that only a guarantee on network uptime will not good enough to put your web site in safe. But unfortunately, in the shared web hosting industry, almost all the uptime guarantee are referred to network uptime, and the industry standard for it is 99.9%. And for most of the dedicated web hosting providers, they will provide the guarantee number for both, but you will be charged much more for their very reliable service.

There are 2 types of uptime in web hosting industry. One is the Network Uptime, and the other one is Server Uptime.

And server uptime refers to the availability of your web hosting server from outside the data center. This will directly determine how possible your site will be accessed without any problem.

Uptime is a measure of the time a computer system has been "up" and running. In web hosting, it is used to refers to how often a site is available or responsive to web requests, and has been one of the key factors to evaluate the reliability of a web hosting solution.

It's usually very hard to maintain a high server uptime in a shared web hosting solution. But there are also some exceptions in the world. In order to find them out, you cannot just look at their uptime guarantee in the selling introduction page. The only way to get a feeling about it before purchasing is to refer to the reviews from their customer or professional web hosting reviewers.

There are also many sites who says they know the uptime of a web hosting company, the data there should be scammed. There is no way to know the overall data of a service provider as thousands of server are hosted in one data centers, how can they verify the data of each server (they might even not know which web site is hosted in which server). So, the data there should only be the data of one or two domains hosted in the vendors' data center. It can be used to as a reference, but you still need to go to some web hosting review sites to know more.

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Uptime Types