I have a site-monitoring service that emails me every-time a site is down and emails me again when it comes back up. I have setup a gmail filter for those emails to automatically label them and move them out of my inbox (I like them empty) and mark them as read. The idea was to see how often the servers go down. I checked about a month later (forgot about it) and see huge number of email on my site down/up labels. I counted out the hours the site was down (based on email time) and it was something like 6 hours in three weeks. Free site-monitoring services don't check often enough so who knows how many downtime notifications I didn't get.
I sent an email telling MT about the situation and I got the same email I got several time before. "We know the problem, we apologize, we are working on it." I blatantly asked them they used to give free months for downtime, what happened to that, he told me that they don't do that anymore.
Honestly, I don't want free hours or gift-bags, I want my service just to work. A lot of people argue that MT has extremely good customer service, which is true - but that has nothing to do with my server continuously going down.
I slowly moved out all my sites from MT and after this month, I am done. Going back to Slicehost.
When your server goes down once or twice, I understand. If it happens frequent enough for a long time, something is wrong and you are not doing enough to fix it.
Just check MT twitter feed, the number of times their site gets hacked or site goes down is unbelievable.