[brk]

Better question is: Is there any hosted anything that actually delivers five 9's?

Most SLAs are crap. Yay, you get a credit of $50 for our 8 hours of downtime. If you're building a mission critical service based on Some 3rd party SLA, you're in for a world of hurt.

[aaronrc]

For application layer servers the 5 9's redundancy can be achieved by deploying multiple servers. Deploying a multiple server redundant database is a difficult problem which distracts from the main application. Hence the desire for a hosted option.