What Happens When Your Image Host Goes Down — and How to Make Sure It Doesn't

An image hosting outage doesn't take your whole website down — it just fills every product photo with a broken-image icon while everything else keeps running. That's arguably worse for trust than the site being fully offline, because visitors see a store that looks broken rather than one that's simply unavailable.

What actually happens during an outage

• Every image request to the down host fails, showing a broken-image icon in its place — across every page, every product, all at once.
• Your site's own uptime metrics may look fine, since the pages themselves still load — the damage is visual and specific to images, which makes it easy to underestimate if you're only monitoring server uptime broadly.
• Cached pages may mask it briefly for return visitors, but new visitors and search engine crawlers see the broken state immediately.

What "99.9% uptime" actually promises

Uptime %	Allowed downtime per year	Allowed downtime per month
99%	~3.65 days	~7.3 hours
99.9%	~8.76 hours	~43.8 minutes
99.99%	~52.6 minutes	~4.4 minutes

A 99.9% SLA — the level included on the Business plan — allows for a small, bounded amount of downtime rather than promising zero, which is a realistic and standard commitment across infrastructure providers generally. The Pro plan goes a step further with a 99.99% SLA, allowing for only a few minutes of downtime per month rather than tens of minutes.

Reducing the practical risk

1. Choose infrastructure with a stated SLA rather than an unspecified "best effort" commitment, so downtime is bounded and defined.
2. Avoid a single point of failure where every product image on your entire site depends on one unmonitored source.
3. Know your fallback — even a simple placeholder image configuration prevents a broken-icon page from being the worst-case outcome.

For stores managing large catalogs where an outage would be especially costly, see our guide on scaling product photography across thousands of SKUs for how reliability and scale intersect.

Frequently asked questions

What does a 99.9% uptime guarantee actually allow for in downtime?

99.9% uptime works out to roughly 8-9 hours of allowed downtime per year, or about 43 minutes per month — a small but non-zero amount, which is why it's described as 99.9% rather than 100%.

If my image host goes down, does my whole website go down too?

Not necessarily — your site's core pages can still load, but every image pointing to the down host will show as broken until service is restored, which visibly damages the page even if the site itself is technically "up."

Which plans actually include an uptime SLA?

Business includes a 99.9% uptime SLA and Pro includes 99.99%. Free and Premium do not include a stated uptime SLA.