Frequently Asked Questions

• What is the Uptimes Project?

  The Uptimes Project is an attempt to collect data on system uptimes from various operating system and hardware configurations. This data is then made public via nifty tables and graphs and statistics. It's not so much scientific as it is geeky, and some people think it's a lot of fun to have "uptime battles" with friends, although this is probably not a sport that will ever be televised or accepted by the general public.

• What is a "system uptime"?

  A system uptime is the amount of time a computer has been running since it was last powered up.

• Is there a way to report my host's uptime from my website?

  Yep! Just use a standard tag, like this:
  
  <img src="http://uptimes-project.org/remote.php?hostid=[host id]&bgcolor=[background color]&color=[text color]" alt="My Uptimes" />
  
  Replace [host id] with your host's id number (this can be found on your host's details page). Replace [background color] with an HTML color value for the image background and replace [text color] with an HTML color value for the text color. For example:
  
  <img src="http://uptimes-project.org/remote.php?hostid=1689&bgcolor=000000&
  color=ffffff"alt="My Uptimes" />

• Does a high uptime mean an OS is stable?

  Not necessarily. This is a common misconception. Uptime alone is merely a measure of how long a system has been continuously running, and does not always take into account how hard that system has been working during that time. Almost any OS, if it has nothing at all to do, will run for a very long time without having any trouble. But only a very good OS on solid hardware will achieve a high uptime while being put to thorough use. We try to compensate for this by allowing clients to report CPU usage and average idle time data, but not all clients support these features yet.

• Why aren't my updates showing?

  Assuming your auth key is correct, your client most likely leaves out the cpu_load and idle values. The server requires that a 0 be put in for these values, a null is not allowed at this time.