Why is the uptime of a website so important?
Apr 18, 2019
Why is uptime for your webisite or API or service is so important. Why important to check availability for your services around the world? Or can I just use CRON job from my server to monitor my website? Let’s review it together!
What is UpTime?
Uptime showing how stable and consistent is your website. In ideal world uptime should be always 100% (it means zero downtime), but usually it’s very difficult to achieve 0% downtime!
In other words, Uptime is number of milliseconds/seconds/hours/days/weeks when your service is working and available for your end users. This metric is opposite of DownTime (see below).
What is DownTime
As mention above, downtime is opposite of uptime. So it’s when you website or service is not available online or doesn’t function well enough for end users to perform some actions on our API or website then the time of this period is marked as downtime. Usually downtime happens because of different things:
- Developer make mistake during new release/update
- Expiring certificates (primary apply for HTTPS) domains
- Server connection or the system breakdown
But why Uptime metric is important for your business?
Uptime metric is important because it actually show your service availability for your customers around the world. If your service (it can be your API, and even 3rd party API, Server or just WebSite) is not available online then mostly this has a bad impact on your business. Just imagine if your website is working correctly, but your Payment API is not working and then your customers can’t generate money stream for your business - and without direct notice from users you may never know about this issue. Or customers cannot user your website so that you can also lose your business. Or even maybe Bind or Google will decide that your website is unreliable and this can negatively affect your rating / SEO as well.
How ApiChecker calculate Uptime?
Formula that we using is pretty simple actually:
- We using number of milliseconds when your monitor/application was down.(in a specific/selected time range)
- And then we divide this number of milliseconds by the total number of milliseconds when your monitor was being monitored (in selected time range as well).
And as final result of above calculation, we get downtime percentage - and as we mention before, it’s opposite of UpTime. So we just subtracted downtime percentage by 100% to get UpTime value.
Let’s review example:
UpTime calculation example
In our calculations we using milliseconds, not seconds - just to be most accurate service for uptime calculation.
In our example ApiChecker monitored a website during 1 full day (= 86,400,000 milliseconds), and in this period of monitoring the website was down for 1,000,000 milliseconds.
To calculate uptime metric, we do following calculations:
- Get total milliseconds when your website was down - it’s
1,000,000 milliseconds. - Get total number of milliseconds your website was monitored: it’s
86,400,000 milliseconds. - Divide
1,000,000 millisecondsby86,400,000 milliseconds, which is 0.001157. - If we convert it to downtime percentages - this is
1.157%. - And as final result, website uptime is:
(100% minus 1.157%) = 98.843% uptime.
Thanks!