A 99.9% uptime guarantee still lets a host be down for about 43 minutes a month. At 99.99%, that drops to about 4 minutes.
Nearly every host below promises one of those numbers or better.
Only two of them, Hostinger and Hosting.com, put in writing exactly what they pay you when they miss.
| Host | Uptime promise | Tier it covers | What it pays if missed | Best for |
| Hostinger | 99.9% a month | Hosting plans under its Hosting Agreement | 5% of that month’s fee, claimed within 30 days | A tight budget that still wants a written credit |
| SiteGround | Not published on its plan pages | Not published | Not published | Rolling back a bad update weeks later |
| Bluehost | 99.99% SLA | Every shared plan, Starter included | Not confirmed | 99.99% on the cheapest plan |
| DreamHost | 100% | Shared hosting, Launch included | Not confirmed | A low first-year bill with daily backups |
| Hosting.com | 99.9% commitment | Shared plans | 5% of the fee per confirmed outage hour, up to a month | A payout that grows with the outage |
| GreenGeeks | 99.9% | Its servers and primary connection | No credit named in its terms | Customers in Canada, Europe or Southeast Asia |
| InMotion Hosting | 99.99% | Power and Pro plan cards | Credit-backed, amount not stated | Three months to test a host |
| WP Engine | 99.99% SLA | Core and Enterprise, not Essential | Not confirmed | WordPress stores on isolated servers |
| Liquid Web | 99.9999% | WordPress hosting plans | Not confirmed | A WordPress site that can’t spare seconds |
| GoDaddy | 99.9% | Every web hosting plan | Not confirmed | Yesterday’s backup and a phone line on any plan |
What an Uptime Guarantee Pays
An uptime guarantee is a refund rule, and it doesn’t make the servers any more reliable. It says what the host owes you afterward, usually a small credit against one month’s bill, worth far less than a lost afternoon of bookings.
Guarantees leave things out, too. Scheduled maintenance is the usual one, and some hosts also exclude attacks and problems caused by your own scripts. And one 40-minute outage adds up to the same monthly figure as 40 separate one-minute blips, though a quote form that breaks every few days is a different problem for your customers.
At the top end the numbers get tiny. A 99.9999% guarantee allows about 2.6 seconds of downtime a month, and a 100% guarantee allows none at all. Over a full year, 99.9% adds up to about 8.76 hours of downtime, and 99.99% to about 53 minutes.
1. Hostinger
Hostinger puts its promise in writing and says exactly what you get back. Its Hosting Agreement guarantees 99.9% of available time each month. If it falls short, you can ask for a credit of 5% of that month’s hosting fee, as long as you claim it within 30 days. The same document lists 11 exclusions, starting with scheduled maintenance and including DDoS attacks and third-party scripts.
For a small business the plan to look at is Unlimited, at $3.99 a month on a 48-month prepay, renewing at $16.99. It’s the tier with daily backups, and it hosts unlimited websites on 50 GB of NVMe storage. The intro price needs a four-year commitment, and the credit arrives only if you claim it.
2. SiteGround
SiteGround‘s best reliability feature is on the recovery side. Every plan keeps automatic daily backups with 30 days of history, so an update that broke your contact form two weeks ago can still be undone. The sites run on Google Cloud infrastructure.
Its uptime promise is harder to pin down. SiteGround’s own hosting page explains that 99.9% allows about 43 minutes of downtime a month, but its plan pages don’t publish an uptime guarantee, so there’s no written figure or credit to claim against.
3. Bluehost
Bluehost writes a 99.99% Uptime SLA onto every shared plan, Starter included. That’s about 4 minutes of allowed downtime a month instead of 43. Starter is $3.99 a month on a 36-month term and renews at $9.99.
That number comes with two trade-offs. Backups on every shared plan are weekly, so a restore could take you back several days. And Starter has 24/7 chat but no phone line. Phone support starts on Business, which is $6.99 a month on the same 36-month term and renews at $13.99.
4. DreamHost
DreamHost puts a 100% uptime guarantee in its headline, and it covers Launch, its cheapest shared plan. Launch is $2.89 a month for the first year and renews at $10.99. DreamHost puts the promise down to multiple data center locations, redundant cooling, emergency generators and constant monitoring. A business that would rather have WordPress managed for it can step up to DreamPress, which keeps 14 days of backups.
5. Hosting.com
Hosting.com has the most concrete payout on this list. Its 99.9% uptime commitment credits 5% of your service fee for every hour you’re down, up to the full amount you paid that month. A four-hour outage is worth 20% of the bill, four times what Hostinger’s credit pays for a whole bad month.
The limits are in the fine print. The credit only covers outages caused by its own network or equipment, its support staff have to confirm the downtime, and you claim it by ticket. Scheduled maintenance doesn’t count. Support is open 24/7 by chat, ticket and phone on every shared plan, and Hosting.com puts its own average first response at 2 minutes.
6. GreenGeeks
GreenGeeks lets you pick from four data centers, in Chicago, Montreal, Amsterdam and Singapore, which suits a business with customers mostly in Canada, Europe or Southeast Asia.
Its 99.9% uptime guarantee covers “only the GreenGeeks servers and our primary co-location internet connection.” A month that falls short earns no written credit, since GreenGeeks’ Terms of Service name no credit or claim process. GreenGeeks labels Premium “Our small business plan,” but choosing it for reliable web hosting for small businesses doesn’t change those terms, and Premium carries the same guarantee.
7. InMotion Hosting
InMotion gives you 90 days to get your money back, three times the 30 days that most hosts here offer. Three months is long enough to tell whether a new host’s outages are a one-off or a pattern before the refund window closes.
Its 99.99% guarantee is printed on the Power and Pro plan cards, and InMotion calls its shared hosting SLA credit-backed without giving the amount. Launch, the cheapest plan, doesn’t show the guarantee and offers chat and ticket support only. Backups aren’t included. They come as an add-on through Backup Manager.
8. WP Engine
WP Engine is built for businesses whose shop runs on WordPress. Its 99.99% uptime SLA covers sites on premium servers with isolated resources, so your site isn’t sharing capacity with other customers’ traffic spikes.
The SLA depends on the plan. It’s marked “Not included” on Essential, the tier most small businesses start on, and comes only with Core and Enterprise. Essential does still get the global CDN, powered by Cloudflare, that comes with every tier. WP Engine also hosts WordPress only.
9. Liquid Web
Liquid Web promises the highest uptime figure on this list, 99.9999% on its WordPress hosting. That works out to about 2.6 seconds of downtime a month. Every WordPress plan also includes a web application firewall and DDoS protection. The company has been in business for more than 28 years and now runs under Nexcess, so some lists call it Liquid Web (Nexcess).
The entry plan is small for the size of the promise. Essentials hosts one WordPress site with 15 GB of storage and keeps 7 days of backups. You get 14 days on Pro and 30 on Elite, and only Pro and Elite get a migration handled by a person.
10. GoDaddy
GoDaddy makes it easy to get back to yesterday. Every web hosting plan includes automatic daily backups, and you can restore the whole hosting account from the previous day. Every plan also comes with 24/7 support by phone as well as chat, which not every host here gives you on its cheapest tier.
Its guarantee is 99.9% across the board, which allows the full 43 minutes a month. The Economy plan hosts one website, so a second site for a new location means moving up to Deluxe, which takes 10. Ultimate goes up to 25.
The Clauses to Find Before You Prepay
Before you prepay for one year or four, find these three clauses in the host’s terms or SLA page.
- The amount the host pays if it misses the guarantee, and the deadline for claiming it. Hostinger gives you 30 days.
- Whether the guarantee covers the plan in your cart. WP Engine leaves it off Essential, so the answer can change by tier.
- What doesn’t count as downtime. Look for scheduled maintenance, attacks, and problems caused by your own scripts.
If a host doesn’t publish one of these clauses anywhere, you’ll have a hard time acting on its promise after a bad month.
