[Fuzzwah]

I chuckled at the "A SysAdmin would be pissed." line and then checked the source to see if there was any javascript which was going to change this line as the uptime % dropped lower and lower.

I was disappointed there wasn't, but perhaps it is some dynamic magic that happens on page load or something....

[thatrailsguy]

That's a great idea.

[muzz]

I don't get the downtime comparison. In government, it's not the result of an unplanned outage that is being addressed to bring the system back up. Rather our governmental "sysadmins" decided to bring the system down, and can simply decide when to bring it back up.

[jaggederest]

Downtime is downtime - if you're measuring service reliability the planned or unplanned nature of it being offline doesn't really come into play. When people say five 9s, they don't mean "except for when you decide to take it offline".

[patmcc]

What? No, that's completely untrue. We guarantee 4 nines on some of our services, but they're measured with 2 hours of allowed downtime early Sunday mornings (we usually don't need this, but very occasionally we do).

[jaggederest]

Then I'm sorry to say, you're doing 4 nines wrong.

[patmcc]

How do you figure? 99.99% of the time our clients expect us to be up, we're up. We're not the electric company; if we're up the right 166 hours in a week our customers aren't impacted.

If you turn your monitor off at night, does it suddenly have 70% availability/reliability?

[MichaelGG]

You're wrong. It's really up to the SLA and business circumstance. For instance, a lot of financial businesses don't operate on the weekend; surely their maintenance on Sunday doesn't count toward them operating at full uptime while open.

[dinkumthinkum]

No, not really, it's more like a Tea Party Virus hit the server.

[RailsResearch]

When we launched the site we were already down to two nine's, so a sysadmin should already have been pissed. We can add more descriptive and dynamic options.