It has become fashionable to claim over 99.9% reliability, especially in the Microsoft camp. Web hosting companies, application servers, database servers, why, even Microsoft and friends (Compaq, Dell) have been touting this number as if it's a big deal.
Consider this:
99.9% uptime amounts to 8.766 hours of downtime a year. With an average reboot of Windows NT/2000 servers taking 5 minutes, this amounts to 525 unscheduled reboots per year, which amounts to over 10 per week -- more than once a day! Holy cow!!
Derived from Competing with Linux
FYI: I run both Unix and NT for different tasks. The old Kamat.com server running Unix (BSD) never needed a reboot in 14 months of its use. The new Kamat.com server running Linux since November of 2001 has not been down even for a second.
So, achieving 99.9% uptime with Microsoft Windows is very easy. Just reboot the server, about twice a day.
See Also:
• Unix Vs. NT (in the context of a Web application)
