A B2B startup of any size will have a very hard time if those 8 hours are during business hours. Depending on the nature of the service, of course. Where I wo

A B2B startup of any size will have a very hard time if those 8 hours are during business hours. Depending on the nature of the service, of course. Where I work now (a small web-based software-as-a-service) an 8 hour outage would be catastrophic, and could easily kill the business. The switching cost for our niche is small, so one bad day could cost us 20% of our clients. We're not running with a 20% profit yet, so at best it'd mean an immediate layoff or across-the-board temporary paycut. Luckily, because we're small we can run on a single LAMP server. We're working on making it so that we can migrate that to any region in EC2 with a single command, as well as making sure we can switch to a different dedicated hosting provider with minimal time.