> I argue that the statistical chances that 3 outages occur at the same moment at my 3 different providers on 3 different continents is less than the chance of

> I argue that the statistical chances that 3 outages occur at the same moment at my 3 different providers on 3 different continents is less than the chance of a single outage at a single CDN. I'm not sure I'd agree with that. You're probably running a pretty similar software stack on each box, so there's a chance that a software update could take down all three or a vulnerability could put all three at risk. I also have a hard time believing that any one cloud virtual server has many 9s uptime, so 3 together isn't likely to get you to Akamai's level. But I prefer to rely on the large players simply because there's advantages to staying with the herd. If Akamai has an outage, much of the internet will be down. People will see that your site is down and attribute it to a larger problem. If your 3 boxes have a problem or your DNS provider has a problem, the fact that your site is down will be more apparent to users. Also, uptime is not just a function of the percentage chance of an outage. The time to recovery also matters. What kind of monitoring do you have in place? How long are your outages likely to last vs those of a large player? If it take you 24 hours to recognize a failed server, then the chances of all 3 failing in a 24 hour period are probably a lot higher than a big player having an outage. There's a lot that goes into high availability that you just don't get by putting your eggs in three small baskets.