What Is a Good Uptime? Understanding the Nines
"We guarantee 99.9% uptime" sounds impressive — but what does it mean in practice? Understanding "the nines" helps you set realistic goals and read SLAs clearly.
The nines, in real downtime
- 99% ("two nines") — about 7 hours 18 minutes of downtime per month.
- 99.9% ("three nines") — about 43 minutes per month.
- 99.99% ("four nines") — about 4 minutes 20 seconds per month.
- 99.999% ("five nines") — about 26 seconds per month.
Each extra nine is dramatically harder and more expensive. Five nines requires redundancy, failover and automation most businesses don't need.
What's a realistic goal?
For most websites and SaaS products, 99.9% is a sensible, achievable target. Revenue-critical systems often aim for 99.95–99.99%.
Your measured uptime depends on how often you check. A 5-minute interval can miss short outages, inflating your number. Check critical endpoints every 30–60 seconds for an honest figure.
Monitor it with TorixPulseTorixPulse tracks your true uptime across 24h, 7d and 30d windows.
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