What is Uptime?

What is uptime and what does it mean? In computer science, it is the period when a computing device such as a CPU or a server or a software application such as a website is functional, operational, and available to use. It’s a measure of system or service reliability and stability. If a system or a service uptime is high, that means the system or the service is more reliable and stable.

Here’s how uptime affect different computing elements: For networks, it refers to the period the network is fully operational. For CPU, it means how long the processor has been functioning since it was started. For servers, it’s the duration that the server is operational and functional. In web hosting, the term 99.9% uptime means the server is operational for 99.9% of the time to provide the services. A score of 99.9% is the industry standard.

This measure is calculated in minutes or seconds and expressed as a percentage of the time the computing device or the service was up.

How to calculate uptime?

Now that you know what is uptime, let’s learn how to calculate it. Consider the functionality of a website for 24 hours. Let’s assume the website was functioning only for 20 hours out of 24 hours.

The total duration the websites was monitored = 24 hours = (24*60*60) = 86,400 seconds

The total duration the website was functioning = 20 hours = (20*60*60) = 72,000 seconds

The website uptime = (72,000/ 86,400) * 100% = 83.33%