Network Solutions advertises a 99.99% Uptime Guarantee. A consumer reading that guarantee will assume that it is a guarantee about their own personal website uptime. However, that uptime statistic is based on an average for thousands of accounts. The individual customer experience can vary widely.

It’s like giving a nation-wide weather report based on the aggregated weather data for hundreds of cities. “Sunny and 70 degrees” may be the average for many areas, but if you’re in the city that is 45 degrees and raining you don’t really care about everyone else’s weather.

If you are among a few dozen sites on a particular server that is down, and it takes hours for the outage to be resolved, then you won’t really care that thousands of other people are experiencing 99.99% uptime.

Here’s the fine print of the Network Solutions Uptime Guarantee:

99.99% Uptime is only for UNIX® customers. The uptime for Windows users is 99.9%. Each uptime calculation is measured by the uptime for the entire customer base across all hosting systems for Network Solutions. Scheduled maintenance to Network Solutions systems is excluded from the calculation of the uptime for UNIX and Windows users as well as events causing downtime that are outside of the control of Network Solutions® or are caused by third parties.

Premium Hosting for Windows limits concurrent connections to 100, which may result outages for customers with higher website traffic.