Every provider quotes uptime percentages, but what do those numbers translate to in real downtime, and what should you hold a partner to?
Uptime percentages are everywhere in IT contracts, but they are easy to misread. A small difference in the number can mean a large difference in the hours your business is offline.
The numbers in plain English
- 99% uptime = up to 3.65 days of downtime a year
- 99.9% uptime = about 8.8 hours a year
- 99.99% uptime = under 53 minutes a year
The jump from 99% to 99.9% is the difference between days and hours. For most businesses, 99.9% is the sweet spot of cost and reliability, which is why we back it with monitoring and clear response targets.
Look beyond the number
An SLA is only as good as the response behind it. Ask how downtime is measured, what counts as an incident, and how quickly a real person starts working on a fix. That is where reliability is really won or lost.
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