How much downtime should I accept?

[carbuncle]

Hi guys,

I currently have a site hosted on a maintained server which was set up by a developer I have been using.

I had noticed the site would go down every so often while I was working on it but didn't but didn't really think it was a big deal.

I have since set up an account with one of those site uptime monitors and have seen that it drops off quite regularly.

I hav spoken to my developer and he says that it is because it is maintained hosting and the server company reboot the server ifthere is an update or security patch.

So my question is: how often should this be happening and how much should I accept?

[ua549]

It isn't so much the frequency as it is the total amount of down time that is most important. The ideal uptime is five nines or 99.999% per month. Clients should see at least 99.5% uptime with a commercial service level agreement. A provider who services mostly non-commercial accounts without an SLA is selling cheap services, not quality services.