27 Nov
1995
27 Nov
'95
3:03 p.m.
Being in the web hosting business, we measure our own "availability" and that of others. The top providers do 99.9%. The median in our sample group is 98.5%. That's about 15 times worse and 11 hours/month. It's amazing how many of the companies in the low 98s claim 99.9%. We also offer guarantees to some of our customers. If we don't meet x% availability, we refund $xx. It's not enough to break us, but it does reassure the customer that we are concerned. If more providers did this, we would probably see much more rapid progress towards more reliable networks. As it is, nobody has a quantifiable cost for "unreliability".
Jonathan> the image of having a 99.98% uptime whenever Jonathan> possible, even though most folks realize