Uptime, downtime & what they mean
Learn what uptime and downtime mean for your website, how they're measured, what causes downtime, and what to do when your site goes offline.
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- Beginner
When people talk about hosting reliability, they talk about uptime — how often your website is available to visitors. When your site is unavailable, that's called downtime. Here's what these terms mean and why they matter.
Quick summary
Uptime is the percentage of time your site is online. 99.9% uptime means your site is down for about 8.76 hours per year. Managed WordPress hosts usually publish an uptime guarantee, and the level you're promised depends on the plan you're on. If your site goes down, check the host's status page first, then contact us.
What uptime means
Uptime is expressed as a percentage of total time:
| Uptime | Annual downtime |
|---|---|
| 99% | ~87.6 hours/year (~3.6 days) |
| 99.9% | ~8.76 hours/year |
| 99.95% | ~4.38 hours/year |
| 99.99% | ~52.6 minutes/year |
99.9% uptime is the figure managed WordPress hosts usually quote, but the guarantee comes with your plan rather than with the host in general. Kinsta's documentation describes an uptime guarantee of up to 99.9%, and up to 99.99% on custom plans. WP Engine lists a 99.99% uptime SLA on its higher plans, not on its entry plan. If the guarantee matters to you, check your plan's terms — or ask us.
The difference between 99% and 99.9% is significant. 87 hours offline per year is nearly four full days — enough to cause real damage to a business.
What causes downtime
Planned maintenance
Hosts occasionally take servers offline briefly for upgrades or maintenance. They schedule it for quiet hours — Kinsta's maintenance window is 2am to 5am in the time zone of the data center your site sits in — and email you in advance about bigger jobs. Kinsta says a site is usually offline for less than a minute during one of its infrastructure upgrades. This is the least disruptive type of downtime.
Server issues
Hardware failures, software bugs, or resource overloads on the hosting side. Hosts watch for this themselves: Kinsta says it monitors every site on its platform and that its engineers respond as soon as one of those checks fails.
Traffic spikes
An unexpected surge in visitors can overwhelm a server. Managed WordPress hosts and CDNs handle this much better than basic shared hosting.
Hosting account suspension
If a hosting account is suspended over an unpaid invoice, the sites on it stop serving visitors. Hosts email you and retry the card first — on Kinsta that plays out over about two weeks — so this is usually avoidable. See renewing hosting & avoiding lapses.
DNS or domain issues
If your domain expires or DNS records are changed incorrectly, your site becomes unreachable even though the server is running fine. See how DNS & hosting fit together.
Plugin or code errors
A bad plugin update or coding error can cause your WordPress site to crash or display a white screen. This isn't technically a hosting issue, but visitors still see a broken site. See troubleshooting hosting problems.
DDoS attacks
A distributed denial-of-service attack floods your server with fake traffic. Managed hosts have protections against this — CDNs and firewalls absorb most attacks.
How to check if your site is down
Try your site in a different browser or an incognito/private window. Sometimes browser cache creates the appearance of a problem that isn't real.
Ask someone else to try — on a different network (e.g. their phone data). If they can see it and you can't, the issue may be specific to your device or network.
Check your hosting provider's status page:
- Flywheel:
status.getflywheel.com - WP Engine:
wpenginestatus.com - Kinsta:
status.kinsta.com
Use a free online "is it down?" checker to confirm the site is unreachable for everyone, not just for you.
What to do when your site is down
Check the host's status page (links above). If they're reporting an incident, all you can do is wait — they're already working on it.
Contact your host's support if there's no active incident reported but your site is down. Provide your site URL and a description of what you're seeing.
Contact us if the issue isn't resolved quickly or if you need help diagnosing the cause.
Uptime monitoring
We include uptime monitoring for sites on our care plans. If your site goes down, we're alerted immediately — often before you notice. We'll investigate and resolve the issue, and notify you if anything requires action on your part.
Common questions
My site was down briefly but is back now — should I be worried?
Brief, infrequent outages are normal. If it happens regularly or for extended periods, it's worth investigating. Contact us and we'll review the hosting logs.
Does downtime affect my Google ranking?
A brief outage is unlikely to hurt your SEO. Google says server errors make its crawler slow down, and that pages already in the index are kept there at first. Pages that keep returning a server error are eventually dropped from the index, so it's a long outage — or the same one happening over and over — that does the damage.
What is a 99.9% uptime SLA?
SLA stands for Service Level Agreement — a commitment from your hosting provider to maintain a certain uptime level. If they fall below it, you may be entitled to a credit on your hosting fee. Check your plan's terms.
Related guides
- Troubleshooting hosting problems
- What is web hosting?
- Renewing hosting & avoiding lapses
- How DNS & hosting fit together
- My website is down
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