In the online world, “availability” is not an abstract metric but a hard dashboard of profit and reputation. Uptime shows what percentage of the time a site or service actually worked and was available to visitors. The closer to 100%, the less often customers encounter errors, carts don’t “fall over,” payment pages open quickly, and support isn’t on fire every evening. When you see “99%” in a provider’s offer, it sounds impressive; however, in reality it means almost 7 hours of downtime per month — and the business impact of those hours can be noticeable even for small projects.