Hosting Terms
What is Uptime?
What Uptime really means, with the jargon taken out — plus the example that makes it obvious.
Straight answer first
Uptime is the share of time a hosting service is actually reachable, and every extra nine on the end shrinks the permitted downtime sharply.
Below: the fuller explanation, a picture that makes it stick, why it matters in practice, and where you will actually run into it.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
100+
Terms on the shelf
2 min
Typical read
Plain
English, we promise
24/7
People if you're stuck
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 your fee when they are missed, rather than promising nothing will ever break.
How the figure gets 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 a host prints on the page.
Uptime, by comparison
The opening hours a shop actually keeps. At 99.9% the shutters come down for about three-quarters of an hour a month with no notice — the sign in the window says open, and just occasionally the sign is lying.
Keep that picture in mind and most of the documentation you will ever read on the subject stops being mysterious.
What is actually at stake
Downtime costs goodwill before it costs money. Visitors rarely come back for a second try, and search crawlers keep a record of the doors they found locked. It is the quiet foundation under every other number you spend time improving.
You do not need to work at this layer every day. You need to recognise it when it explains something, which is exactly the moment this page earns its keep.
Uptime out in the open
An external monitor knocks on a shop's door every minute from outside the network. A 99.9% month means at most 43 of its 43,200 knocks went unanswered, and the alert emails say precisely when it happened.
Multiply that example by every website on the internet and you have the concept's entire job description in one go.
How this turns up in your own account
You will meet it in the control panel and occasionally in a support conversation, usually already set the right way. If this term made sense, the natural next reads are Web Hosting, Dedicated Server, Backup and CDN.
SSL comes free with every plan and reissues itself before it lapses, so nobody has to diary the padlock.
Why we bothered with a hundred definitions
Every confusing term in hosting turns into a support ticket sooner or later, so we defined the hundred most common ones properly, once, in the plain English we would use across the counter.
Bring an existing site and we shift it across at no charge — usually inside 24 hours, with nothing going dark while we work.
- 100+ terms, all in plain English
- Everyday comparisons and real examples
- Related concepts linked together
- Written by the people on the desk
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Honest about what to skip
Most terms are recognise-level rather than operate-level, and the glossary says which is which.
The next reads, mapped
Read on into Web Hosting and Dedicated Server — terms rarely stand alone, so the neighbours are linked.
Grounded in real kit
Examples point at hosting you would actually use, not at an abstract diagram.
The stakes spelled out
Not only what it is, but when it turns out to be the answer to a problem you are having.
Linked, never siloed
Related terms cross-reference each other, so one lookup grows into a working understanding.
Plain English first
Every term defined for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — jargon translated rather than restated.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Find it in your own account
The quickest way to learn a hosting term is to find it in your own panel; five minutes of looking beats an hour of reading about it.
- 2
Check what the defaults are
Our platform ships sensible defaults for this — check rather than assume, and you will know your setup instead of hoping about it.
- 3
Follow the terms next door
Concepts travel in packs — Web Hosting, Dedicated Server and Backup finish this one's picture, and each is a two-minute read away.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- A 30-day money-back guarantee on every hosting plan
- A backup taken daily, with restores you run yourself
- PHP versions picked per site from the panel
- Spam and virus filtering fitted to every mailbox
- Real people on the counter, every hour of every day
- Nothing added at setup — no joining fee, ever
- One-click installs for WordPress and 400+ other applications
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
- LiteSpeed caching running at the server, not bolted on by plugin
- WordPress Toolkit, with updates applied for you
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Can any host hit 100% uptime?
Across a short stretch, often. As a standing promise, no — maintenance, networks and plain entropy see to that. Be wary of anyone guaranteeing 100%; trust open measurement, credits with real teeth, and a status page that keeps its history visible.
How do I check my host's uptime claims myself?
Point an independent monitor at your site. A free external service checking every minute builds a record that belongs to you and nobody else. Your own log beats anybody's dashboard, because it measures exactly what your visitors met.
What does round-the-clock support actually stretch to?
People at the counter at every hour, and a scope that takes in the practical work: mailbox setup, DNS records, WordPress trouble, restores. Not 'the server responds, ticket closed'. Ask us something hard before you order — the reply is a fair sample of what you would get afterwards.
Is the SSL certificate genuinely free?
On every plan, with nothing held back. The certificate is issued the moment your domain points here and reissues itself well before expiry. The encryption is the same as a paid DV certificate — paid tiers exist only for wildcard coverage or organisation validation, which most sites never need.
Can I bring a domain I already own?
Yes, and transfers in are routine. Unlock the name at your present registrar, collect the auth code, then start the transfer from your client area. Whatever registration time is left comes across with it, and DNS keeps answering the whole way through.
Are backups included, and can I put one back myself?
A backup is taken daily on every plan, and the restore is yours to run from the panel in minutes — files, databases or both, at three in the morning without waiting on a ticket. Keeping your own copy offsite as well is never a bad habit, and nothing here stops you.
Where do the servers actually sit?
Our hosting runs from European datacentres with London at the centre, behind server-level caching that keeps cached pages quick for visitors anywhere. For most sites the build of the platform — NVMe disks, LiteSpeed, sensible numbers of accounts per machine — decides the speed far more than the postcode does.
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