I was skimming through CheddarGetter competitor Recurly’s newsletter last night (it arrived at 9:46pm for some reason) and noticed something strange. This morning I mentioned it to our CEO Marc via Campfire and we had the following exchange…
Adam Q: I’m not sure if this is true…
“We’re also proud to announce that we’ve maintained 99.995% uptime in 2011.
Not one of our competitors can make this claim, so we aren’t being shy.”
Adam Q: the uptime part
Marc G: that’s about ½ hour of downtime for 5 months
Adam Q: CG hasn’t been down nearly that long this year, right?
Marc G: nope
Marc G: further, there’s absolutely no way that they can claim that anyway, “uptime” is vague
Adam Q: so is “not one of our competitors”
Marc G: The claim of 99.995 uptime can mean that they were up for at least 99.995% of each day
Marc G: Right, it depends on who they call a competitor
Marc G: CheddarGetter has not been down for more than a few minutes this year. Rackspace went down in January and we were down with them for around 14 minutes.
Marc G: % uptime is one of my things.
Adam Q: It’s a red herring used by cheap hosting companies with non-technical marketing people to try to dupe people into thinking they’re invincible to outages.
Marc G: That’s exactly correct
Marc G: It’s funny to think that Recurly thinks their clients aren’t savvy enough to know better.
Marc G: SLAs usually are a % per day or month
Marc G: 30 minutes of unplanned downtime each month is simply unacceptable.
Adam Q: I’m posting this chatlog on the blog
Marc G: I like it.
Marc G: But only because it’s so “transparent and authentic”
Adam Q: Also “organic and sustainable”
Adam Q: and it happened “in the cloud”
UPDATE: Thanks @deokon for double-checking our math. It’s actually about 10 minutes in 5 months.