{"id":12650,"date":"2020-06-09T15:00:36","date_gmt":"2020-06-09T15:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dotcom-monitor.com\/blog\/?p=12650"},"modified":"2026-09-21T23:34:31","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T23:34:31","slug":"best-practices-to-minimize-website-downtime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dotcom-monitor.com\/blog\/best-practices-to-minimize-website-downtime\/","title":{"rendered":"Best Practices to Minimize Website Downtime"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Engineer
Most downtime is not exotic. It is a change, a dependency, or a surge that nobody rehearsed.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On October 20, 2025, a DNS resolution failure affecting DynamoDB endpoints in AWS us-east-1 cascaded into hours of disruption for Snapchat, Venmo, Roblox, and thousands of smaller services. None of those teams picked bad hosting or forgot to monitor. One shared dependency failed, and everything stacked on top of it went down together.<\/p>\n

That is the uncomfortable truth about website downtime: it rarely comes from the thing you were watching. It comes from the deploy that went sideways at 4 p.m., the TLS certificate that expired on a Saturday, the traffic spike your autoscaler met thirty seconds too late. Generic advice like “choose a good host” does not survive contact with any of those.<\/p>\n

If you want to prevent website downtime, these are the controls that do: redundancy that keeps one failure from becoming an outage, DNS that fails over, deployments that never require taking the site down, surge readiness, and monitoring that tells you before your customers do.<\/p>\n

What an Hour of Downtime Actually Costs<\/h2>\n

Uptime targets are written in nines, and the arithmetic behind them is less forgiving than it looks. Each added nine cuts your allowable downtime by a factor of ten:<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Availability<\/th>\nDowntime per year<\/th>\nDowntime per month<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
99% (“two nines”)<\/td>\n3.65 days<\/td>\n7.3 hours<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
99.9% (“three nines”)<\/td>\n8.77 hours<\/td>\n43.8 minutes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
99.95%<\/td>\n4.38 hours<\/td>\n21.9 minutes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
99.99% (“four nines”)<\/td>\n52.6 minutes<\/td>\n4.4 minutes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
99.999% (“five nines”)<\/td>\n5.26 minutes<\/td>\n26 seconds<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

Translate that into money and the stakes get concrete. ITIC’s annual survey has put the hourly cost of downtime above $300,000 for more than 90% of mid-size and large enterprises. Your number is easier to estimate than most teams assume: annual online revenue divided by 8,760 gives a baseline hourly figure, but outages rarely land on ordinary hours. A store doing $5M a year loses roughly $570 in a random hour and twenty times that in a peak-sale hour, before counting SLA credits, recovery labor, and the customers who do not come back.<\/p>\n

\"Chart
Each nine buys ten times less downtime and costs disproportionately more engineering to reach.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Two practical uses for this math. First, pick a target on purpose: three nines is a defensible goal for most business sites, four nines for revenue-critical paths, and five nines is a budget decision, not a default. Second, check what your vendors promise against what their credits refund; our SLA breach calculator<\/a> does the conversion, and our guide to the cost of downtime<\/a> goes deeper on the revenue model.<\/p>\n

Why Websites Go Down in the First Place<\/h2>\n

Prevention starts with an honest inventory of causes. Most website outages fall into five practical buckets:<\/p>\n