Why you need to pay attention to the uptime in cloud?

Cloud computing has become one of the most used technological innovation in the modern era. It doesn’t matter which type of business you are running or what is the size of your business, you must be using cloud computing in one form of another. High uptime, heightened security, better availability, multi-user access, scalability, flexibility; these are some of the most common benefits of cloud that is drawing flocks of businesses from their traditional business solution. But if you are using cloud then you need to know some of the important points related to this revolutionary technology and one such important part of cloud that you must know is uptime.

While choosing a cloud hosting provider, you will need to look at many things. Most of the people just go through the highlights mentioned on the website of cloud vendor and make their decision. Well, this is not the right approach if you are looking forward to using cloud hosting services at its full potential. Understanding the features offered by cloud vendors is very important in order to know whether you are making the right decision with the selection of cloud hosting provider or not.

While browsing through the websites of cloud hosting providers, you must have seen one common highlight i.e ‘High uptime’. There are many cloud hosting vendors that even mention 99.95 or 99.99% of high uptime. But do you really know what does high uptime means in cloud or how many nines you need in the guaranteed uptime?

What is uptime?

In general terms, uptime is simply the duration for which any equipment remains functional or active. In most of the cases, this duration is calculated in the form of percentage and is represented similarly. When we talk about uptime on the cloud then it simply means the overall time for which the cloud network system remains accessible to you. This is the simple meaning of uptime which is very easy to understand but most of the people get confused by the percentage form of uptime which we will discuss later in this blog post.

You should know that uptime shows the quality of hosting services offered by a cloud hosting provider. This is why almost all the hosting providers highlight uptime in the main section of their website. The higher the uptime will be, the more accessible the cloud network will remain. This is why you should always look for cloud hosting providers that offer high uptime. Lower uptime means that you will face regular interruption in your cloud application and that will hamper your productivity.

Understanding the nines of uptime

Now, you must have understood that it is always better to go with a cloud hosting provider with high uptime as a the cloud network will be more accessible if you will work with a cloud vendor that offers high uptime. But some cloud vendors offer 99.95% of uptime while others offer 99.99% of uptime? What is the real difference between these two uptimes and do the numbers after the decimal points in the uptime really matter?

Well, you should know that there will be a big difference in the availability of cloud network between an uptime of 99.95% and 99.99%. Therefore, understanding the nines of uptime is very necessary. We have broken down some of the most common guaranteed uptimes into a mathematical translation so that you can understand it in a better way.

98% uptime?—?28.8 minutes of downtime on a daily basis which means 3.4hours of downtime every week, 14.4 hours of downtime every month and 7.3 days of downtime every year.

99% uptime- 14.4 minutes of downtime on a daily basis which means 1.7 hours of downtime every week, 7.2 hours of downtime every month and 3.65 days of downtime every year.

99.95% uptime- 7.2 minutes of downtime on a daily basis which means 0.84 hours of downtime every week, 3.6 hours of downtime every month and 1.83 days of downtime every year.

99.95% uptime- 1.44 minutes of downtime on a daily basis which means 0.17 hours of downtime every week, 0.72 hours of downtime every month and 8.8 hours of downtime every year.

So, as you can see that if you will work with a cloud hosting provider that offers 99.99% of high uptime then you will have to face only 8.8 hours of downtime in a whole year and that is almost negligible. But one important thing to know here is the uptime guarantee promised by the cloud vendor doesn’t include maintenance or scheduled outages.

The importance of uptime

Uptime is very important for all those businesses that are totally dependent upon their website or whose customers rely on them. If your customers will start feeling that your website is not reliable is not always available for providing service then they might restrict themselves from visiting your website and that can result into reduced traffic and low profit. But this is just one portion of loss that you will have to suffer because of low uptime because even Google will snatch away ranking benefits from your website in case of low uptime. You should know that Google never pushes up those websites in the search engine result that are not reliable.

If you are using cloud hosting service then also you will need to have high uptime otherwise your employees will keep on facing interruption and they will never be able to work on a seamless business solution. If employees will not get seamless business solution then the overall productivity of your organization will start falling down. This is one of the most important reasons why you need high uptime if you are going to work on a cloud hosted platform. You should always ask about the uptime offered by the cloud vendor in order ensure high quality cloud hosting services. You can even contact some of the current customers of the particular hosting provider in order to inquire about the uptime assurance.