Did you know? · No. 02 · Trivia ·
Five nines leaves only about 5 minutes 16 seconds of downtime a year.
A full year has 31,557,600 seconds. At 99.999% availability, only 0.001% can be unavailable: 315.576 seconds, or about 5 minutes 16 seconds. At 99.9%, the allowance is 8 hours 45 minutes 58 seconds; at 99%, it is 3 days 15 hours 40 minutes.
That is why an extra nine is a real commitment, not a decorative badge. Every extra nine reduces the time-based downtime allowance by ten. Google’s SRE guidance treats the gap between an availability target and actual performance as an error budget: a useful way to balance reliability work against change.
For a small business site, the right target depends on what visitors need. A brochure site, store checkout, member login, and booking flow can have very different tolerance for unavailable moments.
Try this on your site
List the moments when a visitor cannot complete your most valuable task, then choose an availability target that fits that risk. Set an error budget for the period and use it to decide when reliability work should take priority over new changes.
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Each fact is checked against the primary sources listed. Spotted an error? Email the Status Is UP team. Status Is UP helps owners improve their sites; it is not an uptime monitor. For live outage status, see Status Is Down.