The ideal for web hosting is to operate fully 100% of the time; however, this is extremely difficult to achieve, as there are many internal and external factors that can cause web hosting to be unavailable for a certain period of time, in order of probability:
- Website software issue, such as a code failure or excessive resource usage.
- Software or hardware maintenance tasks.
- Interconnectivity issue between an internet service provider and the data center.
- Certain types of attacks, such as DDoS.
- Power failure, internet connectivity outage, cooling equipment failure, fire, physical intrusion, or natural disasters affecting the data center.
In general, due to these factors, it is normal for web hosting to experience several outages of a few minutes several times a year. If the outage is less than 10 minutes and has occurred in isolation, it is not something to be concerned about, as any of these factors may have occurred sporadically—these are completely normal situations, and all parties involved (data center, internet service providers, etc.) are already resolving or have already resolved the issue.
As an example, throughout 2020 this site, giga4.team, had an uptime of 99.98% (it operated for a total of 8,782.25 hours out of the 8,784 hours in the year). It experienced a total of 27 very short and separate downtime periods averaging approximately 2 minutes, and a single longer period of 35 minutes.
If an outage occurs repeatedly, it is worth reviewing, as it may be a software issue or excessive resource usage.