Nine Out Of Ten Isn't Good Enough
Techstrong.IT, Wednesday, April 8th, 2026
One of the things you learn running infrastructure is that percentages can lie. Back in the dot-com days, I spent a good amount of time in the hosting industry. Reliability was the name of the game. And very early on, I learned that a number that sounds good in marketing can be terrible in the real world.
ake uptime guarantees.
Early hosting providers used to brag about 90% uptime. On paper, it sounded respectable. In reality, it was a joke, because 10% downtime translates into weeks of outages over the course of a year. No serious business could operate that way.
Eventually, the industry got religion about reliability. Four nines became the standard. Then five nines. Even then, you were still talking about a few minutes of downtime each month, and those minutes mattered when real systems were involved.
I learned the same lesson again with early text recognition software. Vendors proudly claimed their software was 90% accurate. Sounds great until you run a 1,000-word document through it and realize you now have roughly 100 mistakes to fix.
Suddenly, that 90% number feels a lot less impressive.