what is meant by Uptime in webhosting

A percentage that refers to the amount of time within a given period of time that a system is active or available for servicing requests. For example, if a hosting company says it is available 99.9% of the time, they are claiming that your website will up all the time except for about 8 seconds each day. Over the course of a year, in this example, the hosting company is claiming that your site will only be unavailable (couldn’t surf to it) for 48 hours.  Usually, these percentages are used for marketing purposes and very few hosts can actually claim 99.9%.  They do this because no one can claim 100%! Black Wire Hosting servers are monitored by an automated system that reports each server’s uptime – updated every 10 minutes.  Since these numbers fluctuate all day long, the most accurate reading would be to know what that monitoring system is showing at the present time.  Black Wire Hosting servers are calculated based on their life span…so an older server may have a lower uptime percentage than a newer one due to the fact that it has had “more experience” and therefore more opportunity for downtime.  A good actual uptime percentage can be anything in the 96.5 to 99.9 percent range depending on the age of the server.  For example, at the time of this writing, Black Wire Hosting’s monitoring service reports an overall network uptime average of 99.48%