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Here’s a little-known fact: Even when your hosting provider says it has provided 100% uptime, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your site hasn’t had any downtime.
Why is that? Because many hosting providers calculate their uptime in ways that aren’t intuitive from a customer perspective, ways that sometimes exclude certain downtime.
If you missed that Google had a 2.5-hour Gmail outage yesterday, you were probably hiding under a rock, or possibly in one of those sensory deprivation chambers. Every major tech blog and news outlet was on it (not to mention Twitter users).
It was night-time in the US, which limited the impact there, but the rest of the world wasn’t so lucky. For example, in Europe the outage started at 9:30 in the morning.
Google has now put a number on how much the potential productivity loss for Gmail users was worth.
Gmail could be unavailable for more than 21 hours in a day, and Google could still tell you that according to their SLA, the service has had 100% uptime.
It sounds impossible, but it’s a direct consequence of how Google has written its SLA for Google Apps (which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and more). We will explain this in detail further down, but let’s first look at what the SLA actually says.
We had a look at what kind of uptime guarantees web hosting companies are offering. Especially, how bad they can get. In doing this, we found several examples of web hosting companies that only offer a 95% uptime guarantee. Numbers like that don’t exactly inspire confidence. Why? Have a look below. With 95% uptime, how [...]
