As many other companies offering high availability online applications to their customers, we provide Mojo Helpdesk and Montastic to tens of thousands organizations around the world. And since we want the best hosting experience we host our production servers at Rackspace. It has been a great experience until the last 2 years. Finally, Rackspace recent outages in November and December have propelled them below the 99.99% of availability, which is, by today’s standards, just terrible. Here is a table showing what downtime percentages truly means:
| Availability % | Downtime per year | Downtime per month* | Downtime per week |
|---|---|---|---|
| 90% | 36.5 days | 72 hours | 16.8 hours |
| 95% | 18.25 days | 36 hours | 8.4 hours |
| 98% | 7.30 days | 14.4 hours | 3.36 hours |
| 99% | 3.65 days | 7.20 hours | 1.68 hours |
| 99.5% | 1.83 days | 3.60 hours | 50.4 min |
| 99.8% | 17.52 hours | 86.23 min | 20.16 min |
| 99.9% | 8.76 hours | 43.2 min | 10.1 min |
| 99.95% | 4.38 hours | 21.56 min | 5.04 min |
| 99.99% | 52.6 min | 4.32 min | 1.01 min |
| 99.999% | 5.26 min | 25.9 s | 6.05 s |
| 99.9999% | 31.5 s | 2.59 s | 0.605 s |
I am pretty sure I could host some server under my own desk and achieve a decent four nines with a little UPS. Rackpace downtimes, which the longest was 2 hours 30 minutes (!!!) place them below four nines. Interestingly enough their web states: “100% Network Uptime Isn’t Wishful Thinking, It’s A Guaranteed Reality”. And… that’s more nines they can afford.