Margin Maths
Uptime — The Number Your Clients Will Quote Back at You
Your clients did not read the availability line when they signed, and they will read it during the outage.
Straight answer first
Uptime is the share of time a hosting service is actually reachable, and each extra nine shrinks the permitted downtime sharply. For a reseller the figure matters less than the paperwork around it: what you promised, what your supplier promised, and which of the two a client can enforce.
Never promise more than you hold upstream. Our target is 99.9%, with a pro-rated credit on any month that falls short because of a fault at our end. Sell a stronger number than that and the difference comes out of your own margin rather than anybody else's.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 24 August 2026
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Definitions on the shelf
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Read while the ticket waits
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Monitoring and people
Run the numbers and the percentages start to mean something: 99.9% allows roughly 43 minutes off the air in a month, and 99.99% allows about four. Guarantees generally credit part of a fee when they are missed rather than promising that nothing will ever break.
How the figure is measured matters as much as the figure itself. Whether planned maintenance counts, how often the check runs and where in the world it runs from all shape the number that ends up printed on somebody's page.
Matching your promise to your supply
The commercial rule is simple and constantly broken: the availability you sell must be equal to or weaker than the availability you buy. Our target is 99.9% with a pro-rated credit on a month that falls short through a fault at our end, and it is called a target rather than a contractual SLA on purpose.
If a client needs a stronger commitment, the honest answer is architecture rather than wording. Redundancy across more than one machine, a network in front, a tested restore path: those change the outcome. A bigger number in a document changes only who pays when it is missed.
What a credit actually settles
A pro-rated credit refunds part of a hosting fee. It does not refund a client's lost trading, and no reseller should let a proposal imply otherwise. Say what the credit covers in one sentence, in the same paragraph as the number, where somebody will actually read it.
Ask for it when it applies, because credits are almost never automatic anywhere in this trade. Keep your own record of the incident, note the dates and raise it. A reseller who claims credits is also a reseller who can show a client that they did.
What to say while the site is down
Clients forgive outages and remember silence. Send the first message before you have an answer: what is affected, what you are doing, and when you will next update them. Then keep the promise about the next update, because that is the part that actually builds trust.
Platform faults are flagged to us by the platform we run on, usually before the first customer notices. Your job is translation: one message to your client list in their language, rather than a forwarded technical notice carrying somebody else's name across the top.
Owning your own measurement
Point an independent monitor at your client sites. A free external service checking every minute builds a record that belongs to you, and an external check every minute means a 99.9% month is at most 43 unanswered knocks out of 43,200.
That log is worth more than any dashboard, because it measures exactly what your clients met. It also turns a vague complaint into a timestamp you can escalate, which is the whole difference between a support conversation and an argument.
The paperwork behind the number
Availability, credits and incident communication are commercial subjects wearing technical clothes, and this file treats them that way rather than as engineering trivia.
A 99.9% uptime target sits behind every plan here, watched by monitoring day and night, with people to escalate to at any hour.
- A promise never stronger than the supply
- What a credit does and does not cover
- Incident wording for a client list
- Independent monitoring that you control
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Promise matched to supply
The rule that stops a reseller quietly underwriting the gap between what they sold and what they bought.
Minutes, not percentages
43 minutes a month against about four, so the client conversation happens in units people already understand.
Credits explained honestly
What a pro-rated credit settles, and the sentence that stops a proposal implying rather more than that.
An incident script
First message, next update, plain language, and no forwarded notice carrying somebody else's name on it.
Your own evidence
An independent monitor checking every minute produces a record that belongs to you rather than to a dashboard.
Escalation with a timestamp
A measured minute turns a vague client complaint into something a platform team can actually act on.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Read your own supply terms first
Write down the target you buy and the credit mechanism behind it before you write an availability line into any client proposal.
- 2
Run an external monitor per client site
Every minute, from outside the network. It is your evidence, your alerting and your upgrade conversation all in one place.
- 3
Draft the outage message today
Three sentences you can send in ninety seconds. Written calmly now, it is worth an hour of goodwill during the incident itself.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- A 99.9% uptime target, watched by monitoring day and night
- A pro-rated credit on a month that falls short through our fault
- Platform faults flagged to us before most customers notice
- Real people to escalate to at any hour, for you and for them
- A backup of every client account, taken daily
- Restores you can run yourself, without waiting on a ticket
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
- LiteSpeed caching in front of every client site
- NVMe SSD storage under every account
- Renewal charged at the price on the original order
Across the Counter
Things people ask us all the time
What availability should I promise my own clients?
Never more than you hold upstream. Our target is 99.9% with a pro-rated credit when a month falls short through a fault at our end. Sell that or something weaker, and if a client wants better, sell them architecture — redundancy, a network in front, a tested restore — rather than a larger number in a document.
A client is demanding compensation for an outage. What can I offer?
A credit against hosting fees is what the mechanism provides. It does not cover their lost trading, and a proposal that implied it did is a problem created long before the incident. Claim the credit upstream, pass it on, and be specific about what it is, because vagueness during an outage reads as evasion.
Can any supplier genuinely guarantee 100%?
Over a short stretch, often. As a standing promise, no: maintenance, networks and ordinary entropy see to that. Treat a 100% guarantee as a marketing decision rather than an engineering one, and prefer open measurement, credits with teeth, and a status history you can actually read back through.
How do I prove an outage happened when a client rings the next day?
Your own monitor. An independent check every minute gives you timestamps, and timestamps are what turn a complaint into an escalation. Waiting to be shown somebody else's dashboard leaves you relaying an answer instead of having one, which is a poor look in front of a client.
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