What really is 100% uptime?

So for a long time I actually believed when hosting companies said they offered 100% uptime (not many do to be honest) that it meant your site was always up.  That is not 100% true, there are a number of times where your site can still expereience downtime. Below are just a few of those times.  There are more but I thought we would summarize them here.

• Maintenance windows
  • These are intentionally induced downtime events as part of an effort to maintain the infrastructure. Even during maintenance windows we mitigate many downtime events by having an infrastructure that can failover between servers in the datacenter and failover externally to another datacenters
• Malicious traffic
  • With the network we have built, we can mitigate attacks (e.g., DDoS attacks). While an outage is still possible, we have a rapid recovery to ensure the overall infrastructure is not affected for longer than a brief moment while the network re-routes.
• Hardware and datacenter failures
  • In the event of hardware failure and a server going offline, there is a brief period where the traffic routes to another server in the same data center.
    In the event of a complete data center or pool failure, the traffic is re-routed to another geographic location in a read-only mode. This allows for sites to remain online without causing data replication issues.

So we are very honest and transparent with what it all means. So while we offer 100% uptime (again, not a lot of hosting companies offer this because its very expensive) there could be a few seconds of downtime per year.