Those familiar with uptime usually associate the term with small or personal websites. It is a percentage usually guaranteed by the provider that the content will be up and available to the mass. The goal is to get as close to 100% as possible, but cost can lead many to compromise for less than perfect uptime.

We have heard about Twitter’s terrible uptime and availability. At times, some wonder if there is more downtime than uptime. Major websites have less downtime as they have redundant hardware (which is expensive but worth the cost). People come to rely on services like Facebook, Google, and Yahoo to be up and ready to serve every request a user makes. Redundancy is part of the cost of their business.

Recently, there has been some rockiness in these giant’s data centers. For whatever the cause may be, they have shown temporarily unavailable pages while they scramble to fix the problem. The truth that everyone experiences some downtime at some point in time is finally coming out and the word is spreading.

Some of the giants don’t show any acknowledgment that they are experiencing downtime. This could be that certain servers and users are experiencing an issue that isn’t across the board. To save their user’s from worrying about an issue that doesn’t affect them, and to protect their image of a perfect service, they avoid notifying all users of such an issue. Perhaps that is why we don’t hear about all the issues and downtime that really happen.

Until we live in a perfect world, there will always be downtime and unaccessible periods. Users should expect that the Internet will not always respond instantly with the content they request. Unless you pay for something, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get what you ask for. If you do pay for something, hopefully you can get your money back.