11-Sep-09 Nothing is perfect. Much as we like to tout the robust hardware and rampant failover measures implemented in data centers, systems go down occasionally. That’s why the industry measures reliability in “nines” rather than making absurd claims of 100% uptime. Outages happen, so instead, the questions should be what are reasonable uptime expectations when approaching a hosting provider, and how much slack should you give a provider before shopping around for a replacement?