Why we promise 99.99 %, not 99.999 %
Five minutes of downtime a year was a promise we could not honestly keep. What 99.99 % means, how it is measured, and what changes in our terms.
Until this week our website and our terms promised hosted client projects an availability of 99.999 % a year. We are lowering that promise to 99.99 %. This post explains why a smaller number is the more serious one.
What the numbers mean
An availability figure is easiest to judge as the time it allows a service to be down. A year has 525,600 minutes.
| Promise | Downtime allowed per year |
|---|---|
| 99.9 % | about 8 hours and 46 minutes |
| 99.99 % | about 52 minutes |
| 99.999 % | about 5 minutes |
Five minutes a year is less than the time it takes a person to notice a problem, find its cause and confirm the fix. Services that genuinely reach it do so with large operations teams, several regions in hot standby and years of measured history. We run our own cluster on eight servers at five providers in four countries, with every database write kept on three servers, and we measure it from outside. That is a good setup. It does not justify promising five minutes.
Why we changed it
Two reasons.
First, we had one outage of about seventeen minutes on 8 June 2026, which we have written up in full. A promise of five minutes a year would have been broken three times over by that single morning. A promise we cannot keep is not a feature, it is a liability for both sides.
Second, a client deciding on a provider should be able to trust every number on the page. If one figure is inflated, the reader is right to doubt the others.
How it is measured
The way we measure stays the same: from outside our infrastructure, once a minute, at the address named in the contract. A minute counts as available when the site answers, and as unavailable when it does not answer or answers with a server error. Maintenance windows agreed in advance and failures outside our operation, such as the client's own domain registrar, are not counted; failures of the hosting providers and DNS services we chose ourselves are. The results are available to the client on request, and status.elchi.dev shows our own services' measured availability.
What changes in the terms
The website states 99.99 % from this week. Our general terms follow in version 1.6. For clients with a running contract the change is announced at least 30 days in advance, as section 15 of our terms requires, and until then the old figure applies to them.
Written by Samuel Krauss, Founder. Filed under operations, availability.