I don't think it's quite a simply answer like X% uptime. A lot of the decision is the 'quality' of the downtime. For example: * Is it generally stable, but on

I don't think it's quite a simply answer like X% uptime. A lot of the decision is the 'quality' of the downtime. For example: * Is it generally stable, but only going down in peak load situations (obviously no good if you know peak load occurs when you are doing critical new product release/sales etc, but may be okay if you peak load corresponds to non-critical events). * How long is the outages? If it goes down for 1 minute each day, that may be more acceptable compared to '100%' uptime except one day when it goes out for 365 minutes. All of that affects the impact that the downtime has on your venture - it's quite possible you might have 'poor' uptime stats, but it has zero effect on your business, in which case the cost/effort savings from using a 'poorer uptime' hosted service may be worth it.