There is no way they can achieve that uptime claim, nor should they try to say they have 99.9999% aka "six nines". That's 31.5 seconds a year, and even a well-

There is no way they can achieve that uptime claim, nor should they try to say they have 99.9999% aka "six nines". That's 31.5 seconds a year, and even a well-designed network is going to have that much at some level. I mean, the VPSes might be distributed across hardware, but a failure of some component might mean that it's still "up", but seriously degraded during the transition. How useful is that for "uptime"? It becomes a bragging right. How about if all routes to a large provider, like Level(3) are down for a reset period, or are re-routed through Cogent, which is maxed out on all peering with L3 at 99% packet loss levels? Is that really uptime? Sure, that's out of their control, but the situation with their own website being down for some people right now underscores that lofty claims are meant to be broken. Now that they're beating that Joyent drum a little more: watch them fall down under a DoS attack that Amazon could bat away at this point. I'm by no means supporting Amazon, but Joyent is still a small company with big claims. I predict they will fall apart when Sun stops making hardware, and when their engineers argue over whatever trendy "wrong way to do it" Node-type technologies that they're jacking off over next.