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%.
I'd be terribly interested to know how you obtained these figures...we do
web hosting services as well. I had one of our clients complain angrily
for weeks that his web site was frequently "down" because he couldn't get
to it from AOL. I had to sit him down and show that his site was
operational and accessible from a dozen other sites to convince him that
AOL was the exception, and that our connectivity and server reliability
were not to blame.
I find it hard to believe that many providers could offer only 98%
reliability (assuming, of course, that this is a measurable quantity;
this is shaky ground); this implies that over an average period of 100
hours (less than 4.2 days), there exists a total of 2 _hours_ of
"downtime" (assuming, again, that this, too, is determinable in any
meaningful sense).
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.
Do you take the customer's word for it?
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".
I think the reason for this is obvious. If a customer complains that
your network is unreliable because he can't reach it from point X, do you
give him a refund? Not all of us can afford that...I know we get more
than a few complaints of this type every month.
// Matt Zimmerman Chief of System Management NetRail, Inc.
// mdz@netrail.net sales@netrail.net
// (703) 524-4800 [voice] (703) 524-4802 [data] (703) 534-5033 [fax]