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The "R" Word >>
When you say reliability, what exactly does that mean? One person's idea of reliability may be another's idea of terrible service. For example, we have a customer who does business internationally. Although they appreciate maintenance being scheduled afterhours, it still interrupts their business. They are truly a 24 hour a day shop, so no maintenance window is good for them. Likewise, a standard 8 to 5 customer could care less what happens after they leave, as long as it doesn't affect their business.
Affecting business is the key to uptime and reliability. That is why reliability means different things to different types of customers, especially with a global, Internet-based economy. Yesterday's catalog order business, has created today's life and death electronic commerce market. Drug companies that have need of critical genetic material and data to launch a billion dollar drug cannot afford to wait "until the Internet is back up."
So what is good reliability? What kind of uptime is considered good? Well, that comes down to what you can live with for your business. Maintenance window aside, downtime at a critical time, is never good. In this case, the reliability and maintenance philosophy of your ISP is critical.
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