[gfunk911]

It all depends on what the SLA says, but hypothetically, if they are down for 24 hours a year, that's 99.7% uptime, which isn't terrible.

Heroku had a 1-2 hour outage the week after we switched an app there last year. My boss was freaking out, cursing about how they were unreliable, etc, neglecting the following:

1. The timing was unfortunate, but that was the first outage in months.

2. We had had multiple outages on our Rackspace box that were our own fault, due to bad server management.

In the long term you're likely better on Heroku, for small companies at least.

[whirlycott1]

Uh... 99.7% is ridiculously bad if you're doing anything that matters.

[mst]

Depends, really.

Internal examples:

If shadowcat's public facing website is down for a day, a few people can't read blog posts and maybe we'll miss out on a potential customer - but our existing customers will be entirely unaffected.

If our ticket tracking system is down for a day, it'll annoy the hell out of the existing customers but we can still get the work done since they all have direct email and IM contact info for people.

On the other hand if our ircd is down for an hour, it's time to panic, because that massively interrupts our ability to co-ordinate our work.

External examples:

If linked in is down for a day, I don't care - anything I do on that can wait until tomorrow.

If duckduckgo is down for a day, I am going to burst into tears because I use it all the time for information I want -now- and going via google is substantially more annoying.

So "anything that matters" is really quite relative.

[sgt]

99.7%? Ridiculously bad?

I just did the calculation. That's about a day of downtime. I'd say it's bad if:

- The downtime is scattered all over the year. 1 hour downtime here, 30 min downtime there.

But not if:

- This 1 day of downtime is scheduled, e.g. during the holidays. Scheduled and planned is the keyword. If the client is informed and aware of it, the client will also remain happy.

You'd be surprised how much downtime clients are willing to put up with, as long as they are informed well ahead of time.

[kes]

I agree with you, but only in theory. I can't think of one thing that runs 100% non-stop.

Even in places like medicine or finance or security. Stuff breaks, things fail. It's sad, but the reality is there.

[jackowayed]

Of course nothing will have 100.0 (repeating)% uptime. But 99.7% uptime means it can be down for over 2 hours every month. Anything less than 99.9% uptime (which means 3x less allowed downtime--a big difference) is probably unacceptable, and if downtime costs you serious money, you're going to want more decimal places.

[invisible]

Part of my job is network administration of a small (~50 server) colo/hosting service. It's unacceptable for us to be down for even 30 minutes (from our perspective and our clients). We maybe top out at 5 hours of downtime a year (during a bad year) and most of that (unfortunately) is upstream from us.

[citricsquid]

Move to vps.net for a few weeks, then move back to Heroku, by that time he'll be counting uptime not downtime!

[ahoyhere]

We've been running on Slicehost for almost 2 years and I believe we've had two outages, one of which wasn't a real outage but a backbone provider went kaplooey in Europe. That can't really be helped.

Heroku, on the other hand, feels like it's up and down more than... something that goes up and down a lot. A friend of mine hosts his blog there and he launched a small product today and he kept sending his customers to an error page, because Heroku was up, down, up down, up down.

If it's a misconfiguration of your own, you can get it fixed. But if your hosting provider has an unsound business, you can't fix that except by leaving.

[timcraft]

Yo-yo :)