Cloud Hosting Uptime: What 99.99% Really Means

Uptime percentages sound abstract until you convert them to actual minutes of downtime, and the gap between 99.9 and 99.99 percent is far larger than most people assume.

Every extra nine represents an order-of-magnitude jump in reliability, and the price tracks it. Choosing the right SLA means matching the guarantee to what an outage actually costs your business.

• 99.9 percent allows about 43 minutes of downtime monthly
• 99.99 percent allows roughly 4.3 minutes monthly
• 99.999 percent allows under 30 seconds monthly
• SLAs often exclude planned maintenance windows

Read the SLA’s fine print, especially what counts as an outage and how credit is calculated.