Writer: Alexandra Anderson
Editor: Lillian Castro
Reviewer: Cristian Lopez
Although your brick-and-mortar business may have routine 9-to-5 hours of operation, your online presence is open for business 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year — or it should be, if you’ve signed up for web hosting with a reliable uptime guarantee.
Business owners in 2024 likely know they need a website. Even if you’re a small operation or only cater to locals, you still need a virtual storefront to bolster the success of your business’s physical location. Having a website means exposure to a broader pool of potential customers or clients; it helps you establish credibility in your field. People trust businesses with an online presence other than a Facebook page and a Yelp listing.
You wouldn’t randomly close your doors during peak business hours, would you? Downtime costs you, so web hosting providers offer uptime guarantees to assure you of their service and reliability.
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99.9% Uptime Guarantee (Industry Standard)
Any host worth its salt will offer a minimum uptime guarantee of 99.9%. Anything less is hardly a promise to be proud of, and most of the top shared hosts boast 99.9% uptime rates. This equates to roughly 10 minutes of downtime each week or about 43 minutes in 30 days.
Because of the increased competition at this level of hosting, services with a 99.9% uptime guarantee are extremely affordable. These hosts match the quality and reliability with attractive price tags for the wide range of features that come free of charge.
Take a look at our reviews of some of the most popular options:
Hostinger.com
Monthly Starting Price $2.69
- 24/7/365 ticket and live chat support
- 99.9% network uptime guarantee
- FREE domain, site builder, backups, SSL certificate, and AI tools
- Unlimited bandwidth, databases, and email accounts
- Speedy NVMe SSDs optimize performance
- Get started on Hostinger now.
Behind a mission to make life easier for website developers and their customers, Hostinger provides fast, stable, and streamlined services at a price that is very hard to beat. Founded in 2004, the bootstrapped company hit the 10 million websites mark a decade later, achieving ICANN accreditation and localizing services in 39 countries. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 100 GB SSD – 200 GB NVMe SSD | FREE (1 year) | 3 minutes |
A2Hosting.com
Monthly Starting Price $1.95
- SSDs and TurboServer for 20x faster pageloads
- Host unlimited websites and FREE site transfer
- Optimized plugins and 1-click installs for WP
- Pre-installed OPcache and Memcached caching
- FREE HackScan with restore options
- Get started on A2 Hosting now.
If speed and performance, partnered with support and security, are at all priorities in your web host shopping, A2 Hosting should be a leading contender. When A2 Hosting first launched in 2003, the company was focused on serving developers; A2 Hosting was among the first providers to offer PHP 5 and to support Ruby on Rails on shared servers. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 100 GB SSD – Unlimited SSD | New or Transfer | 5 minutes |
SiteGround.com
Monthly Starting Price $2.99
- FREE site transfer or new site setup
- FREE daily backups, CDN, email, and SSL
- 24/7 expert support with no wait on phone or chat
- Recommended by WordPress as a top host
- Ideal for business email hosting
- Get started on SiteGround now.
With an impressive breadth of overall hosting services offered, SiteGround is a leading innovator in the hosting space — from custom software solutions to premier customer support. The company offers the full range of web hosting features, including a free Cloudflare CDN, cPanel with SSH access, and unlimited MySQL databases and bandwidth — not to mention prize-worthy customer support. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 10 GB SSD – 40 GB SSD | New or Transfer | 6 minutes |
iPage.com
Monthly Starting Price $4.99
- Great hosting packages for first-timers
- Drag-and-drop site builder included
- FREE domain name registration and email accounts
- 24/7 support via phone, chat, and email tickets
- 38% OFF for HostingAdvice readers
- Get started on iPage now.
With an excellent price-versus-performance tradeoff, iPage has plans starting at around $2 a month. The hosting company’s shared offerings are hard to compete with, especially for folks that are new to web hosting and just need a simple site. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | Unlimited | FREE (1 year) | 6 minutes |
GoDaddy.com
Monthly Starting Price $6.99
- Industry-leading load times
- Award-winning support and security
- World’s #1 Domain Name Registrar
- Choice of cPanel or Plesk included
- 99.9% uptime guaranteed
- Get started on GoDaddy now.
GoDaddy is exceptionally well-known in the hosting space, typically serving as site owners’ introduction to the world of web hosting. The company makes it incredibly easy and affordable for folks to choose a domain name, sign up for hosting, and start building their online business or personal web property. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 25 GB – 100 GB | FREE (1 year) | 4 minutes |
99.99% Uptime Guarantee (Above Average)
Pushing the hosting industry status quo for reliability are the hosts with 99.99% uptime rate guarantees. These providers assure their customers’ sites will experience no more than about a minute of downtime in a seven-day time span, or a hair over four minutes in a 30-day stretch. Hosts with these guarantees are few and far between, as most either stick with the status quo or go all in on high availability (with five nines or better).
HostGator.com
Monthly Starting Price $2.64
- Familiar and easy-to-use cPanel control panel
- FREE drag-and-drop custom website builder
- Unlimited disk space, email, and bandwidth
- Flexible term lengths with no contract required
- 74% off your first three years
- Get started on HostGator now.
HostGator has been around for more than a decade and is well-respected for its large number of servers and consistent reliability. Known mostly as a shared hosting provider, HostGator still supplies decent dedicated and VPS options if you need your site to scale. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 10 GB SSD – 40 GB SSD | FREE (1 year) | 6 minutes |
99.999% Uptime Guarantee (Superb SLA)
And here we have the rate hosting experts say to strive for — “five nines or better,” as folks often say. This supreme uptime rate slices the aforementioned downtime rates in half — 30 times over. Few hosts have the chutzpah or the physical infrastructure capacity to pledge this level of availability, but it is most commonly found in dedicated and virtual server plans.
Covering a range of uptime needs, InMotion Hosting is known for its market-leading hardware, performance-enhancing SSD storage, and ultra-reliable expert support. The host’s dedicated servers come with the added benefit of an industry-leading uptime guarantee. The company assures 99.9% uptime across all hosting plans, and dedicated server customers enjoy 99.999% net uptime, thanks to the redundant-switching network design of InMotion’s Smart Routing™ technology.
InMotionHosting.com
Monthly Starting Price $35.00
- Bare-metal or managed servers available
- 1-on-1 time with a server administrator
- 99.99% uptime via Smart Routing™ technology
- Tier 1 network with redundant bandwidth
- SSH root access and DDoS protection on all servers
- Upgrade for cPanel, migration, and auto backups
- Get started on InMotion now.
InMotion Hosting offers amazingly fast and reliable dedicated hosting on market-leading hardware — making it an easy choice for anyone seeking a premium dedicated server host. From free SSDs to a fanatical support team, InMotion has all the bases covered for both small-scale and large-scale operations. Go to full review »
| Setup Time | Disk Space | CPU | RAM |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 minutes | 1 TB SSD – 3.2 TB SSD | 12 – 32 cores | 192 GB DDR4 – 512 GB DDR4 |
Meanwhile, InterMedia employs Microsoft-certified system architects and engineers to monitor and maintain its cloud servers. According to the web hosting company’s white paper on the subject, the cloud environment is specifically engineered for performance, availability, and data protection.
This rare gem of a service offering is a game changer for IT decision-makers. Kevin Finnegan shared his experience choosing Intermedia in the testimonial video above.
99.9999% Uptime Guarantee (Rare and Really Reliable)
It’s worth noting that uptime guarantees may not include scheduled downtime for maintenance, or there could be other caveats. Even the most reliable hosts may only make this pledge on certain plans, and most providers can only pull it off with strategic datacenter locations.
As a relative newcomer to the web hosting industry, Hostwinds makes a major splash by promising a 99.9999% uptime guarantee — allowing for just 30 seconds of downtime each year. Coupled with all-SSD infrastructure and dozens of options for operating systems and other software configurations, Hostwinds provides advanced and ultra-reliable hosting solutions at a price point that is friendly to beginners, as well.
Hostwinds.com
Monthly Starting Price $5.24
- 500% faster speeds via SSDs
- LiteSpeed web server performance
- FREE dedicated IP address
- 99.999% uptime guarantee
- Datacenters in Dallas and Seattle
- Get started on Hostwinds now.
Promising enterprise-grade hosting solutions for prices that appeal to small and medium businesses, Hostwinds delivers the full range of operating systems and server configurations to help customers build and grow an online presence. With hosting plans covering niches like vBulletin and Minecraft, Hostwinds attracts a customer base as mixed as the server configurations. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 days | Unlimited SSD | New or Transfer | 5 minutes |
100% Uptime Guarantee (Best in Class!)
First we have the Holy Grail of uptime guarantees: the 100% availability promise. Only a small faction of web hosting providers will vow to keep your site online at all times or pay the price. This uptime guarantee is almost exclusively limited to dedicated, cloud, and virtual server plans, so you’ll notice price points and resources that match the high reliability.
Shared hosting customers typically do just fine with a 99.9% or 99.99% uptime guarantee.
One of our favorite hosts to recommend for service and support, Liquid Web delivers best-in-class hardware, expert support, and round-the-clock availability monitoring to back the 100% network uptime guarantee. Few hosts have the means to offer such a promise.
Liquid Web’s infrastructure offers custom confirmations, robust security, and meticulous backups conducted by the team. The company’s relentless efforts to keep your site(s) online are reflected in the host’s consistently exceptional Net Promoter Score (NPS), which translates to the likelihood of a customer recommending the services to a friend.
LiquidWeb.com
Monthly Starting Price $14.70
- Heroic Support® and fully managed hosting
- Linux or Windows options with cPanel, InterWorx, or Plesk
- Industry leader in customer loyalty and NPS score
- Servers proven faster than AWS and Rackspace
- 100% uptime guarantee plus built-in backups
- Get started on Liquid Web now.
We’ve gotten to know a few key members of the Liquid Web team personally, and let us tell you: The passion they put into talking about their products hints that this is a company worth checking out. Liquid Web boasts supreme uptime, always-there-for-you support, and a constant commitment to building out more functionality for the customer. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 40 GB SSD – 200 GB SSD | New or Transfer | 7 minutes |
When updating this article, I was thrilled to discover DreamHost also promises 100% uptime. According to the Dreamhost Terms of Service, customers will be compensated for any time in which their website, databases, FTP, SSH, or webmail becomes inaccessible for reasons other than scheduled maintenance or coding or configuration errors on the customer’s side.
DreamHost.com
Monthly Starting Price $2.59
- Unlimited traffic, storage, websites, and email
- US-based customer support available 24/7
- 200% faster performance with SSDs
- Industry-leading 97-day money-back guarantee
- Enjoy preinstalled WordPress and FREE transfer
- Get started on DreamHost now.
A top-notch host for those who know what they’re looking for, DreamHost offers nuanced and performant hosting perfect for scaling websites and applications through the ranks of shared, VPS, cloud, and dedicated hosting. We love the company’s features but realize that beginners or hobbyist developers might not want to fork over the extra cash to capitalize on the performance, optimization, and managed services that DreamHost offers. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 97 days | Unlimited | FREE (1 year) | 4 minutes |
No Uptime Guarantee: Bluehost
Bluehost is a staple in shared web hosting and regularly delivers the 99.9% uptime rate customers expect from popular hosts, but does not guarantee uptime rates or reliability. While Bluehost promises to try to resolve any issues within 15 minutes, extreme server pains may take longer to relieve.
That would be a major red flag for essentially any other hosting provider. Nevertheless, Bluehost is a trusted partner for millions of individuals, small business owners, and enterprise professionals. The hosting company is endorsed by the WordPress.org team, offers round-the-clock expert support, and is routinely recognized by the shared hosting community. We have no problem suggesting Bluehost as an option, so long as you aren’t expecting to enforce the regular uptime policies found elsewhere.
Bluehost.com
Monthly Starting Price $1.99
- Support for up to 100 websites and unlimited email hosting
- 1-click WordPress installs and software updates
- Support for popular shopping carts with FREE SSL
- Up to $200 in Microsoft and Google Ad credit
- Industry-leading hardware and uptime rates
- Get started on Bluehost now.
Bluehost has long been a favorite of mine in the shared and WordPress hosting spaces. The company adheres to modern standards for hardware, and its customer service resources are now backed by hosting industry titan Newfold Digital. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 10 GB SSD – 100 GB SSD | FREE (1 year) | 5 minutes |
Uptime Guarantee Definition & Downtime Calculator
Bringing it back to the basics, uptime is the amount of time your website is online and accessible to the public. Naturally, you want this rate as close to 100% as possible. As such, hosting providers often offer an uptime guarantee to distinguish their service from that of competitors.
An uptime guarantee is your web host’s assurance your site will be online a certain percentage of a year. You can calculate how much cumulative downtime to expect for your site given a certain uptime rate, or see the highlights below. It’s generally understood that 99.9% uptime is a hosting industry standard, whereas five nines or better (99.999% and up) is the ideal.
- 99.9% uptime means your website may be down for a total of eight hours, 45 minutes, and 57 seconds each year.
- 99.99% uptime means your website may be down for a total of 52 minutes and 35.7 seconds each year.
- 99.999% uptime means your website may be down for a total of five minutes and 15.6 seconds each year.
- 99.9999% uptime means your website may be down for a total of 31.56 seconds per year.
- 100% uptime means your website is always online (be sure to read any SLA fine print!).
Some hosts offer a service-level agreement (SLA) with their promise of availability. In short, an SLA commits the host to a refund should a customer experience downtime that exceeds the uptime guarantee. An SLA typically defines a minimum outage period to give the host time to detect the error. Then a host may credit you a certain percentage of your monthly fees for a month in which you experience more downtime than normal.
You can download a free example of a host SLA here.
Ensure Your Site is Virtually Never Down By Trusting a Reliable Host
Just as the owner of a much-loved local brunch spot wouldn’t abruptly lock the doors at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning — denying customers access to Bloody Marys and hash browns — you can’t afford for your online store or professional site to go down.
Consider your web host a silent partner in your business. The team keeps the lights on and helps ensure things run smoothly, but the brand is yours to foster and grow. Review servers and plans from the most reliable hosts of 2024 for more of the best uptime guarantees to get started!
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