If I was supplying you IT services and I said to you. "Your system will be available 99% of the time!"

You may be tempted to think. Wow 99% is great.

But lets do the maths.

361.4 / 365 x 100 = 99.0%

So despite being up for 361.4 days a year you can have a 3 days and 15hrs worth of outages in 365 days and still claim 99% uptime.

If you go further to 99.9% uptime then:

364.7 / 365 x 100 = 99.9%

Or a total of 8hrs and 45minutes in unplanned outages in 365 days to have 99.9% uptime.

When thinking of running a business from cheaply hosted web providers. Ask yourself.

• How much outage time in my peak business times can my business cope with?
• Is paying 4-10$ a month for cheap shared hosting going to cause me to lose thousands in revenue if down for an entire business day?
• Do I have access to top level support if something goes wrong?
• If I am using a shared service will I have the resources available during the providers peak times?

So in the end you have to weigh up the options and make a decision based on your circumstances.