Rackspace fanatical support dropped below four nines

Front of the Pack

As many other companies offering high availability online applications to their customers, we provide Mojo Helpdesk and Montastic to tens of thousands organizations around the world. And since we want the best hosting experience we host our production servers at Rackspace. It has been a great experience until the last 2 years. Finally, Rackspace recent outages in November and December have propelled them below the 99.99% of availability, which is, by today’s standards, just terrible. Here is a table showing what downtime percentages truly means:

Availability % Downtime per year Downtime per month* Downtime per week
90% 36.5 days 72 hours 16.8 hours
95% 18.25 days 36 hours 8.4 hours
98% 7.30 days 14.4 hours 3.36 hours
99% 3.65 days 7.20 hours 1.68 hours
99.5% 1.83 days 3.60 hours 50.4 min
99.8% 17.52 hours 86.23 min 20.16 min
99.9% 8.76 hours 43.2 min 10.1 min
99.95% 4.38 hours 21.56 min 5.04 min
99.99% 52.6 min 4.32 min 1.01 min
99.999% 5.26 min 25.9 s 6.05 s
99.9999% 31.5 s 2.59 s 0.605 s

I am pretty sure I could host some server under my own desk and achieve a decent four nines with a little UPS. Rackpace downtimes, which the longest was 2 hours 30 minutes (!!!) place them below four nines. Interestingly enough their web states: “100% Network Uptime Isn’t Wishful Thinking, It’s A Guaranteed Reality”. And… that’s more nines they can afford.

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