Uptime might not matter for small hosts that do mom and pop websites
or so-called "beta" blog-toys, but every time Level3 takes a dump,
it's my wallet that feels the pain. It's actually a rather frustrating
situation for people who aren't big enough to justify a /19 and an
AS#, but require geographically dispersed locations answering on the
same IP(s).
I'm not sure why you think you need to be that big to get portable IP
space. Policy 2002-3 allows for the issuance of a /22 to any organization
which can show a need and the ability to utilize at least 50% of a /22
with multihoming. An ASN can be obtained pretty easily if you intend
to multihome. About the only thing that might stand in the way of
a small organization is the up front cost, but, even that is less than
$2000.
Owen
It's entirely possible that I was mistaken with regards to /19 vs /22,
but a /22 is still way more ips than I really need, I mean hell, I'm
not really using my /24 currently. I don't nearly have 256 machines,
and I certainly (without honepotting almost all of it) justify 1,024
ips.
In fact, in my network infrastructure currently, I've got one
loadbalancer that sits in front of 6 machines that don't have public
ips, so there goes any thought of justification 
and yet, when I'm
at 4 load balancers, I'll want them in geographically dispersed
locations, with a variety of upstream providers so that I don't have
to deal with the issues surrounding single-homed networking.
Hi, Vladis --
Thanks for the email. Unlike a number of ISPs operating in the same geographic region as ourselves, a loss of core systems or connectivity causes something more than the sweat on the forehead of the people responsible for SLA-credit-avoidance... it causes a 100% revenue loss for the period of the outage.
When you reach a certain size, in the UK at least, your business insurance partners will expect you to demonstrate how you have taken steps to avoid this entire outage.
When the company reaches another size, you may find your continued employment also depends on some degree of constant availability.
This is what I mean by 'will never do'. A lot of small firms can sit out an evening without trading. To us, this represents 'real pain'.
Best wishes,
Andy
It's actually a rather frustrating
situation for people who aren't big enough to justify a /19 and an
AS#, but require geographically dispersed locations answering on the
same IP(s).
If the number of IPs you require is small, then you can
probably solve the problem with IPv4 anycasting. Several
people have built out distributed anycast networks but
the problem is that they think IPv4 anycast is a "DNS thing".
Therefore they don't sell anycast hosting services to
people like you who need it.
Of course, if you made them more aware of market
demand, this could change.
--Michael Dillon