Learn · Deployment & hosting
Uptime is the percentage of time your site is available and working. It's often quoted as a number of nines: 99.9% uptime allows roughly 8 to 9 hours of downtime a year, while 99.99% allows under an hour. Reputable hosts target 99.9% or better, and many back it with a service guarantee.
Some downtime is normal for maintenance and rare failures, so no host is perfect. What matters is that outages are brief and rare, and that the host responds quickly when they happen. For most sites, 99.9% is a reasonable expectation.
For a business where downtime directly costs money (a store, a booking system), it's worth paying for higher reliability and monitoring that alerts you the moment the site goes down. Knowing quickly is half the battle in keeping outages short.
Updated July 2026
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Match the host to your site's type and traffic, then weigh reliability (uptime), speed, support quality, security features, and price, in roughly that order. A simple site fits cheap shared hosting or a free platform tier. A busy store or app needs cloud or a VPS. Don't choose on price alone.
A rollback is reverting to the previous working version when a new deployment causes a problem. Instead of scrambling to fix a live issue, you switch back to the last good version in seconds, restoring service while you investigate calmly. The ability to roll back fast is a core safety net.
Deployment is the process of taking code from a developer's computer and putting it live on a server so real users can access it. It covers moving the files, configuring the environment, and switching the site over, ideally with no downtime. "Shipping" a change means deploying it.
DNS (domain name system) is the internet's address book. It translates a human name like example.com into the numeric IP address of the server that hosts the site, so your browser knows where to connect. Every time you visit a site, a DNS lookup quietly happens first.
HTTPS is the secure version of the connection between a browser and a site, and SSL (now technically TLS) is the certificate that enables it. It encrypts data in transit, so passwords and payments can't be read in between. It's shown by the padlock, and as of 2026 it's mandatory in practice, not optional.
A domain name is your site's readable address (example.com), which you rent from a registrar, usually for around $10 to $15 a year. It points, via DNS, to wherever your site is hosted. You don't own it forever, you lease it, so it must be renewed to keep it.