[rhizome]

I think people tend to overestimate the value of nines to the user. It's chiefly a management/VC/busybody metric that has gained importance mainly due to it being a high level and easy to understand abstraction. "Well how much was it down?" Then they spend zillions on failover software, hardware and talent that could be supplanted by one fewer nine and a simpler architecture.

And really, just to get a dig in here, I believe Arrington shares a big part of the blame for this state of affairs with all of his Dvorak-caliber ignorant harping about Twitter back in the day.