I struggle to imagine large corporate websites such as eBay and MSN encountering any downtime at all, let alone enough downtime to measure it in hours.
The following link gives us the low down on the downtime for the top 20 websites according to Alexa in 2007.
http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=134
It’s interesting to note that yahoo.com have got it right with zero downtime. YouTube on the other hand has been down for a whopping 8 hours 44 minutes so far this year. It turns out that site downtime is a fact of life regardless of how much cash and resources you have on your side.
What I like about the statistics most of all is that although arguably our server arrangement is not nearly as complex as the corporate counterparts mentioned in the list we’ve had zero downtime this year. This tells me that we must be using the correct hardware and we have chosen an excellent network provider.