• Agreement between the service provider and its customer formally defining the level of uptime the service will deliver
  • Uptimes are generally measured in nines. The more the nines, the better.
  • For example, a service guaranteeing 99.999% of uptime has 3 nines.

99.99% is not enough

Availability %Downtime per dayDowntime per weekDowntime per monthDowntime per year
99%14.40 minutes1.68 hours7.31 hours3.65 days
99.99%8.64 seconds1.01 minutes4.38 minutes52.60 minutes
99.999%864.006.05 seconds26.30 seconds5.26 minutes
99.9999%86.40 milliseconds604.80 milliseconds2.63 seconds31.56 seconds

Sources