You have probably visited a few website hosting service providers which offer something like 99.5%, 99.8% or 99.9% uptime guarantee. In this article I will give you some tips how to avoid situation when you sign up for a web host offering such guarantee but the real uptime is significantly lower.

1. Never care about promises without proof. If you find a website hosting service offering attractive guarantee check out their website for the stats.

2. If you find the uptime statistics take into account if they are provided by the web host itself or independently by third party service. You should look for links to these monitoring services and check out the uptime history. Data from last 6 months are most important -- they will tell you how is the host doing now. It may happen that the company was bought by somebody else some time ago and this fact may have impact on the quality of the provided services including uptime (both positive or negative). Another situation when the service quality may change comes when the web hosting company gets a lot of clients in the short time. For some of them may be difficult to manage more servers and some downtimes may happen.

3. Beware of fake uptime stats. Some monitoring services allow to the website hosting companies resetting the downtimes to zero because web hosts display icon with uptime stats on their websites with link to the uptime monitoring service. So the monitoring service is motivated to show good uptime because they will have better chance to gain targeted backlinks. If the hosting company resets the downtimes the stats will show 100% uptime even though they was down a few hours every day. Look to the section for web hosting companies to find out if this is possible. Also check the downtime history. If the company is monitored for many months and never was down it is suspicious. If you find some downtime let's say one year ago you can be sure that the stats for the last year are accurate.

4. It is possible you will not be able to find any statistics on the web hosting companies website. In this case you should try to google for something like "company name uptime" or "company URL uptime monitoring". Try also to search for phase "company name down". This way you can find some warnings in the forums if the hosting provider has often downtime issues.

5. Established companies are usually reviewed by current and past customers. Search for reviews in webmaster related forums or create new thread and ask others to share their experience. Some of the forum members may use third party monitoring system which will send him a message in case his website is down. Such services usually also offer uptime statistics. So try to find some current or past clients which will willing to share these stats with other forum members.

6. 100% uptime is not possible forever. Every server needs restart time from time. Every web hosting company has its server located in some data center and no data center can guarantee 100% uptime. So avoid providers promising 100% uptime.