A site only exists for visitors while some computer is online to answer them. That computer and the service around it is hosting, and how reliably it answers is uptime.
You do not need to be an engineer to keep a site online. You need to know the five things that usually take it down.
Hosting is the computer that serves your site to visitors, and uptime is the share of time it is reachable. Most downtime comes from expired domains, expired certificates, bugs and overload, so renew early, monitor, and keep backups.
What uptime percentages really mean
An uptime of 99.9 percent allows roughly 8 to 9 hours of downtime in a year. 99 percent allows about 3.5 days. Those numbers sound close but feel very different to a shop that sells every day.
Be careful with promises. No provider can promise a site never goes down, and your own code and settings count too.
What usually takes a site offline
Most outages are ordinary and avoidable:
- An expired domain name that nobody renewed.
- An expired SSL certificate, so browsers show a warning.
- A bug in a new change that you published without testing.
- Sudden traffic or a slow database that overloads the app.
- An outside service, such as payments, being down.
Publishing with Uttra
With Uttra you describe your site, check it in the live preview, and publish it on an Uttra subdomain or on your own domain. Always preview a change before you publish it, because a broken update is the most common cause of downtime you can prevent.
For your own domain, put the renewal date in your calendar and turn on auto-renew. Where your visitors are matters too: a site mainly for customers in the Gulf is better served from a location close to them, and personal data rules such as the PDPL may affect where data is stored.
Monitoring and backups
Do not wait for a customer to tell you the site is down. A free uptime checker can message you when the home page stops answering, so you learn first.
Keep your code in GitHub through Uttra's GitHub sync, and download the code now and then. Back up your database separately. If something goes wrong, you can move to another host with your own files.