In the real world, the difference between 99.5% uptime and 100% uptime is important, expensive and worth paying for.
I saw this in a drama thread but it wasn't worth derailing that thread over. However, this drove a stake into my brain and heart so I had to make a deal over it SOMEWHERE.
ANYONE WHO IS GOING TO BE HOSTING MY SERVER FOR ME SHOULD KNOW THAT AN UPTIME OF 100% IS UNACHIEVABLE.
It's not possible to have 100% uptime because even if you never take the servers offline for Windows updates (bad idea, have fun with your viruses), some natural disaster could easily come along and wipe out the power to your data center. Claiming that you can achieve 100% uptime is false advertising.
The best you can hope for is the
five nines rule, or 99.999% uptime. Even that's incredibly unrealistic, because you need more than half a minute every month to do necessary maintenance.
Let's say that every week your servermaster backs up your data, updates Windows, and downloads any new versions for software you have. Let's optimistically say this takes ten minutes a week on average. Consulting the chart above, that's 40 minutes per month, which is an uptime of 99.9%.
Now let's say that instead, the server is never taken offline for any updates or backups of any form, so you have an artificial 100% scenario. Then your server gets a virus and has to be taken offline for hours or even days for a patch that could have taken minutes if it had been done earlier. Well done, your uptime for that month just dropped to around 98%, 97%, maybe even 95%.
Now, as much as I loathe Kalphiter, at least he knows better than to claim blatantly unrealistic uptime amounts. His servers host thirty, fifty, eight people without any noticeable latency loss. They're incredibly cheap and good servers, all things considered. And he gives himself about a half an hour per day to do whatever needs to be done (assuming Lub's 99.5% figure is correct). If I had to choose between half an hour a day of server downtime and half a week of server downtime every three months, I'm going to choose the former.
AND FINALLY...
In the real world...
We are NOT talking about prospective SALES here. We're talking about a server for ungrateful bastards who join your server, suck the life out of it, pound you into the ground, and give you nothing to take away from this pain and punishment. We're talking about Blockland.
