The 6 nines mean that an ideal service should have 99,9999% uptime, right?

That’s almost 32 seconds of downtime in a year!

If so, how much would it cost to do it? (Let’s consider that is a marketplace site with 1000 daily users)

  • Notorious@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    6 nines is really really difficult. It’s hard to estimate costs without specific requirements, but a marketplace site with 1000 daily users means you’re expecting about 1 user per minute, which isn’t a lot. I’d imagine you could get by with the cheapest cloud hosting.

    The real problem is that most major cloud providers don’t offer 6 nines. Even AWS only offers credits below 99.5%, so you’d want to not lock yourself into a single provider. My best suggestion is to have a small/cheap server with all of the big names and load balance/round robin between them.

    • SpacePirate@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      This.

      At some point, you need to be able to quantify the risk to your business before you can do this.

      For instance, if your business earns $10 per transaction, and you perform 100 transactions per second, the difference between five and six nines (313 seconds vs 31 seconds) is $282,000; nowhere near enough to justify the added investment.

      Edit: Important to note that for the first example, these are already enormously huge numbers. Such a business, assuming no holidays or weekends, would be grossing $31.5 billion per year, in the same ballpark as Oracle and Coca Cola.

      So when we say the company is losing 282,000, this is a tiny, tiny fraction of revenue. Even 99.5%, which is almost two days of downtime, would “only” be a loss of 0.5% of all revenue for the year. Sure, this is $157M, but even that would probably not cover the cost of a six nines infrastructure (that said, they could save up to $120M per year by achieving 99.9%, which would be worth exploring).