A 99.9% uptime promise means your host is allowed to be down about 43 minutes a month, and about 8 hours and 46 minutes a year, before it owes you anything. What it owes you is almost always a credit against your own hosting bill. None of these promises pay for the job you lost while your site was dark.
The math is something you can check
A 365 day year holds 525,600 minutes. Multiply 365 by 24 by 60 on your phone and you get the same number.
One tenth of one percent of that is 525.6 minutes. That works out to 8 hours and 46 minutes a year.
A 30 day month holds 43,200 minutes. One tenth of one percent is 43.2 minutes.
So 99.9% does not mean always on. It means down less than about one workday a year and still inside the promise. 99.99% is a different animal. That is about 53 minutes a year, or roughly 4 minutes a month.
Google writes the math out the same way. The Google Workspace Service Level Agreement, last modified January 30, 2025, defines Monthly Uptime Percentage as “total number of minutes in a calendar month minus the number of minutes of Downtime in a calendar month, divided by the total number of minutes in a calendar month.” Google commits to at least 99.9% in any calendar month.
What the guarantee actually pays out
Read the remedy before you read the headline number. Here is what four published documents say.
- Bluehost’s shared hosting uptime guarantee page, updated August 6, 2026, promises 99.99% on shared plans bought on or after March 5, 2025. If the server misses it, you may get a coupon worth at most 5% of that month’s hosting fee. One coupon per month, no matter how many outages. You have 30 days to ask.
- DreamHost’s General Terms of Service, last updated June 22, 2026, says “DreamHost guarantees 100% uptime.” The payout is DreamHost credit worth one day of service for each hour of interruption, “up to a maximum of 10% of Customer’s next pre-paid hosting renewal fee.”
- Cloudflare’s Business Service Level Agreement says the service “will serve Customer Content 100% of the time without qualification.” It then caps credits so the total in any twelve month period “shall not, under any circumstance, exceed one (1) month of a Customer’s cumulative total monthly service fees.” That page carries no update date.
- Google Workspace pays in days of service. Three days, seven days, or fifteen days, depending on how bad the month was.
Notice what the ceiling is in every case. The most a bad month can cost the host is a slice of what you already pay them. If an outage costs you a re-roof estimate or a weekend of service calls, the credit does not come close.
The exclusion list is the real contract
Bluehost’s page spells out what does not count. Scheduled maintenance or repairs. Problems from custom scripting, coding, or third party apps you installed. Outages that hit the portal, FTP or email but not the website. Breach of the hosting agreement. “Causes beyond our control or unforeseeable events (e.g., DDoS attacks).” Your own internet provider. Browser caching or DNS issues.
DreamHost excludes previously announced scheduled maintenance and “coding or configuration errors on the part of the Customer.”
Cloudflare excludes anything “due to factors outside Company’s reasonable control,” anything “that resulted from Customer’s or third party hardware or software,” and anything from “actions or inactions of Customer or third parties.”
Now think about how a contractor’s site really goes dark. A domain that lapsed. A DNS record pointing at the wrong place. A plugin update that broke a page. An attack. Most of those sit on the excluded list. So does the maintenance window the host picked.
This is not legal or tax advice. An uptime page is one part of a contract you signed, and what a court in your state makes of that contract is a separate question. If real money rides on it, have an attorney licensed in your own state read the whole agreement.
Somebody has to notice, and that somebody is you
DreamHost’s terms put the clock on your side of the table. “DreamHost’s assessment of downtime begins when Customer opens a support ticket to report the problem.” If the site went down at 6am Saturday and nobody filed a ticket until Monday, the weekend may not count.
The claim windows are short as well. Bluehost gives 30 days after the downtime ends. Google Workspace gives 30 days. Cloudflare wants notice within five business days of the incident, then the full claim by the end of the following billing month.
So the guarantee is worth nothing at all unless you find out fast, and finding out is a separate job from hosting. That job is covered in how you find out your site is down before a customer does.
Plenty of hosts promise nothing, in writing
Not every platform publishes an uptime number. Squarespace’s Terms of Service, effective March 27, 2025, has none. It says the services are provided “as is” and “as available,” and that Squarespace “makes no warranty or representation that the Services will: (a) be timely, uninterrupted or error-free.” Liability is capped at the greater of $20 or what you paid in the previous twelve months.
That $20 floor is printed in the document. Go read it yourself.
That is not a reason to quit Squarespace. Sites run for years on terms like these without trouble. It does show that a promise on a marketing page and a real record of staying up are two different things, and only one of them is written into a contract.
One limit on everything above. Five documents are not the whole market, and each company can rewrite its own page whenever it likes. Bluehost’s page carries an August 2026 date. Read your host’s page, not this one, before you decide anything.
What to do next
- Search your host’s name and the words “uptime guarantee.” Open the page on their own site, not a review blog.
- Read the exclusion list before the headline number. That is where the promise gets narrow.
- Find the claim window and write it down. Thirty days is common. Five business days happens.
- Work out what the credit is worth in real dollars on your plan for one bad month. Set that next to one lost job.
- Put something in place that tells you the site is down before a customer does.
If a guarantee is the only thing keeping you at a host, that is a thin reason to stay. If it is the only reason you are about to move, that is a thin reason to move too. Switching carries its own risk, which is laid out in changing hosts without going dark.
What Galloping puts in writing is what gets built, listed on the website build page, and what it costs each month, listed on the pricing page. A number nobody can promise is worth less than a page you can read.