Here’s a little-known fact: Even when your hosting provider says it has provided 100% uptime, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your site hasn’t had any downtime.

Why is that? Because many hosting providers calculate their uptime in ways that aren’t intuitive from a customer perspective, ways that sometimes exclude certain downtime.

When hosting providers calculate their uptime (normally on a monthly basis), they follow a set of rules that are usually lined out in their terms of service, i.e. in the fine print. Here are a few common rules that some hosting providers use:

• Not counting maintenance downtime – If a hosting company interrupts the service for two hours to perform planned maintenance, this will often not be counted into the uptime percentage. In other words, when it’s time to calculate the uptime percentage for that month, any planned service interruptions simply aren’t counted.
• Not counting shorter periods of downtime – Perhaps the most prominent example of this is Google Apps (including Gmail) which won’t count any downtime that is shorter than 10 minutes. So if Gmail were to be down five different nine-minute periods, you’d have had 45 minutes of actual downtime, but no official downtime as far as Google is concerned.
• Only counting network downtime – This one is especially common among dedicated hosting providers. Individual server failures that may or may not affect your site aren’t counted. To be fair, for dedicated hosting providers it would be difficult to guarantee anything else when the customer has control over the server.

These methods make it easier for hosting providers to fulfill their uptime goals, for example not going below 99.9% uptime in a month. If you have a service level agreement with your hosting provider it might be a good idea to take a close look at how its uptime percentage is calculated.

Further reading:

In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

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The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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