Every shared-hosting landing page promises "99.9% uptime" or even "100% uptime". The number looks like a measurement. It is almost never one. It is a guarantee: a line in the terms of service that says what the provider owes you if it fails to keep that number. This post explains how to read those numbers, using the 11 hosting providers in our ranking as examples.
What 99.9% actually means
Uptime percentages are easy to misread because the gap between them looks tiny.
- 99.9% allows about 43 minutes of downtime in a 30-day month (0.1% of 43,200 minutes).
- 99.99% would allow about 4 minutes.
- 100% allows none, at least on paper.
So "99.9%" is not a promise that the site will be up. It is a promise about how much downtime can happen before the provider has to compensate you, usually with account credit.
What we found across 11 providers
We collected the uptime guarantee from each provider's official terms or SLA page. The result splits into two groups:
- 99.9%: SiteGround, ScalaHosting, Kinsta, GreenGeeks, Hostinger, InterServer (6 providers)
- 100%: IONOS, DreamHost, Hosting.com (A2 Hosting), Hostwinds, WP Engine (5 providers)
A "100%" guarantee sounds stronger, but two things matter more than the headline:
- What is excluded. Scheduled maintenance, network problems outside the provider's control and "abuse" are commonly carved out of the calculation. The headline number says nothing about the size of the carve-outs.
- What the remedy is. Most guarantees pay in credit toward future service, not cash, and you usually have to file a claim within a short window.
Because of this, we treat the guarantee as one input, not as a measurement of real reliability. In our methodology it is the single biggest metric inside the reliability factor (weight 3 of 8), next to the money-back period, company age and daily backups.
The money-back window is a better signal than it looks
The refund period is the one guarantee you can use without proving anything. In our data:
- 9 of 11 providers state a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Hostwinds lists 0 days.
- For WP Engine we could not confirm the period from an official page, so the table says "Not verified".
If you are choosing a host for a new project, the practical test is simple: pick one with a refund window, move a real copy of your site there, and watch it for a couple of weeks before the window closes. Your own monitoring beats any SLA percentage.
Price: look at the term and the renewal
The cheapest plan in the table is priced on a 12-month term:
| Provider | Cheapest plan, per month (12-month term) |
|---|---|
| IONOS | $1.00 |
| InterServer | $2.50 |
| DreamHost | $2.89 |
| ScalaHosting | $2.95 |
| GreenGeeks | $2.95 |
| SiteGround | $3.33 |
| Hostwinds | $6.99 |
| WP Engine | $28.00 |
| Kinsta | $30.00 |
Hosting.com (A2 Hosting) and Hostinger show "Not verified" here, because we could not read a clear price for that term from their pages.
The spread between $1.00 and $30.00 is not a sign that one is a rip-off and the other a bargain. Kinsta and WP Engine are managed WordPress platforms, and the low-end shared plans are a different product. That is why we keep the price factor at 25% of the Score rather than letting it decide the order. We also score whether the renewal price is published, because many shared plans are cheap only for the first term.
How the Score is put together
The hosting Score (0-100) combines five factors with fixed weights:
| Factor | Weight |
|---|---|
| Reliability (uptime guarantee, refund window, company age, daily backups) | 30% |
| Price (cheapest plan, published renewal price, free domain) | 25% |
| Features (free SSL, data-center locations, staging, email) | 20% |
| Support (24/7 live chat, phone) | 15% |
| Transparency (status page, security certification) | 10% |
A provider is ranked only if at least 70% of its weighted facts are confirmed. Where we can't verify a fact, it stays empty and counts as missing, not as "no".
The current top of the table
- SiteGround - 82/100
- IONOS - 79
- DreamHost - 79
- Hosting.com (A2 Hosting) - 76
- ScalaHosting - 74
Limitations
- We do not run our own uptime monitoring. A guarantee on paper is not the same as measured availability, and we say so in the methodology.
- Terms change often. Each fact shows the date it was last checked, and the ranking is recalculated after every update.
- Some providers hide details behind interactive pages. We don't work around that, so some cells stay "Not verified".
If you see a number here that has gone stale, say so in the comments and we'll re-check the source.
Full ranking, sources and methodology: https://global-rating.com/en/software/hosting/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=hosting
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