At the heart of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model is the understanding that the service will always be available when needed. In our 24×7 flattened world, that pretty much means all the time.
While we strive to ensure that our client’s customers will enjoy 24x7x365 availability, in reality, there are too many moving parts involved in order to commit to that Service Level Agreement (SLA) affordably. Besides, we’re not operating a heart lung machine where lives are at stake 
Nevertheless, we do aim to do our best, and at the very least, we do promise our clients a 99.5% monthly availability…which translates to no more than 3.60 unavailable hours per month.
Almost a year and a half ago, I instituted daily operational stand-up meetings that (amongst other things) are dedicated to monitoring our data center and application performance daily. I did this because while much of our operations are automated, human beings are still needed to provide oversight and to design and institute process improvements as warranted. That seems to have worked out well for us. Although, because we weren’t keeping track of our cumulative available hours, we really didn’t know how well…until now!
Starting this month, at the beginning of every month, we’re going to publish our Availability statistics. Along with the data, we’ll also offer any color commentary that appears appropriate for that month’s data. This month I’ll start with posting our first set of numbers (retroactive to the beginning of this year) and explain some of the terms used. canary in their mine
I’m very proud of the investments that we’ve made in our data center’s infrastructure, tools and procedures. Thanks to them, our clients can all sleep well at night. Starting today, we can visualize just how well they can sleep!
Sam