How Many Nines?

Time was when e-commerce firms were focused on having as many nines as possible in their data center uptime statistics. Four nines - that's 99.99 percent uptime - was good, but five 9s was even better. You'd see all kinds of data about how much every minute of downtime cost a web retailer. Maybe it's a sign of the times, but today I came across a press release from a major e-commerce firm touting three nines of reliability.

In today's press release about its data center scalability, e-commerce firm Digital River said its web site is handling as many as 1.7 million dynamic page views and 44,000 online orders per day. That's about a transaction every two seconds. The firm, which sells downloadable software products, also proudly noted its 99.92 availability track record.

Digital River's availability equates to 7 hours and 28 seconds of downtime over the course of a year. Four nines, by comparison, translates into 52 minutes and 33 seconds of annual downtime, while five nines equates to just 5 minutes and 15 seconds of downtime.

Downtime is not cheap. For the largest Internet sites, it can be hugely expensive. A 22-hour crash by the eBay web site in June 1999 cost the company more than $5 million in returned fees from auctions, according to Internet Week. But eBay survived, and many of the companies that built data centers to those multi-9 standards were crushed by the debt load of building those facilities.

In the cost/benefit analysis of the post-crash market, many companies are deciding that the real-world cost of buying an extra nine or two of reliability now outweighs the financial risk of hypothetical downtime later. To be sure, financial firms and other high-reliability operations continue to need all the uptime they can get. To most of the rest of the world, 99.92 percent looks like a number to brag about. At least from a marketing perspective, the allure of those extra 9s isn't what it used to be.