Hosting Terms, for Name Holders
Uptime, and the outage no host can fix
The site is unreachable, your host says every server is up, and both of you are telling the truth.
The short answer
Uptime is the proportion of time your hosting is genuinely reachable — but reachability has two halves, and only one of them belongs to the server. A name that has expired, or whose delegation is broken, is a total outage on a platform with nothing whatever wrong with it.
Which is why the uptime figure on a hosting page, however good, describes only half of your exposure. The other half sits at the registry and in your zone, and no service level agreement reaches either.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
100+
Terms defined for people who hold names
2 min
To read, at an unhurried pace
Plain
English, with the registry jargon translated
24/7
Cover on the support desk, all year
Turn the percentages into minutes and they stop being abstract: 99.9%, the target watched here, permits around 43 minutes offline in a month. What a guarantee normally promises is a pro-rated credit against a missed target rather than a claim that nothing can ever fail.
Name-side outages are not measured in minutes at all. An expired registration is out for as long as it takes somebody to notice, pay and wait — and in the redemption phase the cost of noticing late is several times the renewal fee.
Two clocks, and only one is the server's
Clock one is availability: is the machine answering requests? Clock two is resolvability: does the name still turn into an address? A monitoring service that only fetches a URL cannot tell you which clock has stopped, because both produce the same red dot on the same dashboard.
Learn the two error shapes and you will diagnose most incidents in thirty seconds. NXDOMAIN means the name does not exist as far as the resolver is concerned — expiry, or a delegation that points nowhere. SERVFAIL means the nameservers were found but would not or could not answer, which is usually DNSSEC or a dead nameserver.
The outage that reaches past every guarantee
Expiry. The sequence is fixed and no supplier can shorten it: a grace period of around thirty days when a renewal still recovers the name, then redemption at several times the fee, then an open auction where anybody may take it.
Two causes account for nearly all of it. Auto-renew was never switched on, or the card on file expired and the failure notice went to a mailbox on the very name that was about to lapse. Both are prevented in about four minutes.
Delegation faults look exactly like downtime
Both nameservers on one machine is the classic: a reboot to apply a kernel patch and every name delegated there stops resolving. Next is a DNSSEC mismatch after a registrar move, where the DS record at the registry no longer matches the key the zone is signed with, and validating resolvers refuse the answer rather than serving it.
Third is a typo in a glue record, which fails only for people whose resolvers had not already cached the right answer — so it looks intermittent and regional, and the person who made the change is usually the last to see it.
Monitoring the name, not only the page
Watch three things rather than one. The page, as usual. The resolution of the name itself, from more than one network, so a delegation fault is distinguishable from a server fault. And the expiry date, which a monthly whois check or a calendar entry will keep in front of you.
Certificate expiry belongs on the same list. A certificate that has lapsed produces a warning frightening enough to end most visits, and the site behind it is perfectly healthy the whole time.
The half of availability that lives at the registry
Every host publishes an uptime figure and none of them covers the name. Expiry, delegation and DNSSEC are the outages that produce the longest downtime and the least useful error messages, so they get the space here that a percentage usually gets elsewhere.
Support means a person at any hour, including the awkward questions about somebody else's registrar.
- Neighbouring records and registry rules linked together
- Written by the people who answer the transfer tickets
- Locks and grace periods given in days, not folklore
- Panel screens named, so you know where to click
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Two failure domains, told apart
NXDOMAIN against SERVFAIL, and what each one tells you about where to look first.
The failure mode named first
Every entry says what breaks earliest when the job goes wrong, and the answer is very often email.
The registry clock made explicit
Grace, redemption and auction stated as a sequence, so late noticing has a known price.
Ownership before convenience
Where a shortcut quietly costs you control of a name, the entry says so before it explains how the shortcut works.
Monitoring that includes the name
Three things to watch rather than one, and why a URL check alone cannot diagnose a delegation fault.
Panel screens named
You are told which screen to open, not merely which concept to hold in your head while you go hunting for it.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Resolve the name before you blame the server
One dig from a network you do not control separates a name problem from a hosting problem in seconds.
- 2
Check the expiry date, then the card
Auto-renew on, a live payment card, and the renewal notice arriving at an address that does not depend on the name itself.
- 3
Spread the nameservers, then watch them
Two nameservers on two networks, monitored independently of the website, so a reboot is not an outage.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- NVMe storage behind a LiteSpeed cache on every tier, the smallest included
- Softaculous in the panel for one-click installs, WordPress among them
- PHP versions chosen per site from the control panel
- DDoS filtering absorbed at the network edge
- ImunifyAV+ sweeping every site on the account for malware
- WebP image optimisation built in, at no extra charge
- Free SSL on every plan, reissued before the old certificate lapses
- Auto-renew switched on or off name by name from the account
- Webmail in the browser, with IMAP, POP and SMTP for any client you prefer
- The latest cPanel, with people on the support desk at any hour
Frequently Asked
Questions we field again and again
The host says everything is up but my site is unreachable — what now?
Resolve the name from a network you do not control and read the error rather than the page. NXDOMAIN points at the registration or the delegation: check the expiry date and the nameservers published at the registry. SERVFAIL points at the nameservers themselves or a DNSSEC mismatch. A timeout with a correct address points back at the server after all, and now you can say so with evidence.
Does an expired domain count against a hosting uptime guarantee?
No, and it is worth understanding why not. The guarantee covers the platform's availability, and during an expiry the platform is answering normally — there is simply nothing telling the world to ask it. Registry-side downtime falls outside every service level agreement in the industry, which is precisely why auto-renew and a valid card matter more than the number of nines on the pricing page.
What happens if a name is allowed to expire?
First a grace period of around thirty days, during which a renewal still recovers it. Then redemption, where recovery costs several times the renewal fee. Then an open auction, where anybody may take it. Auto-renew, plus a payment card that has not quietly expired, is the whole of the prevention.
Where is the name itself renewed — here, or at the registrar?
Both, in different senses. Names ordered here are registered through WHMCS's registrar modules — Namecheap for most extensions, PKNIC for the .pk family, which its registry only sells on a two-year minimum term — so the registry holds the expiry date while the renewal invoice reaches you from your client area. Auto-renew is a toggle on each name, and the invoice arrives before the registry clock starts to matter.
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