Many hosting services will guarantee uptime and charge you dearly for it. (BTW, 99.9% uptime in a year allows for 8.766 hours of downtime, If your business can't afford a day off, then paying for their SLA may be worth it for you.) Truthfully, the infrastructure of the Internet as a whole is more likely to go down then the average Hosting Service provider. The “Internet” being made up of thousands of “NAP”s (Network Access Points) could have a problem at any one of these Points that could keep you from getting to any number of websites. The rest of the country may be able to see www.example.com, but your entire town may not. The hosting service is still fulfilling their Uptime guarantee, even though thousands of people at any given moment may not be able to visit the site.

Tamarack does not offer a guarantee of uptime, partially for this very reason. We are located in a suburb of Indianapolis, Indiana where there are less then a dozen major carriers. Some of these carriers are large enough to effect more then 10% of the nation if it were to go down. We can only account for what we have control of, and that is our own Data Center. While we are currently a small hosting company we have ensured that we have the basics; Bright House networks, a reliable Internet Provider with great customer service and quick response time to network outages. Duke Energy, our electrical service provider w/ GREEN power options. Electrical filtering and backup in part provided by APC a leader in Electrical Service Protection. We use extremely dependable Compaq Proliant servers in combination with Novell SuSE Linux for all of our Data Center Servers in order to provide time proven, industry hardened reliability.

Aside form scheduled downtime for upgrade our NOC has only had one unscheduled server outage in the past three years. This outage related to one of our older mail servers that was being decommissioned and had most of our clients migrated off of it. No paying customers lost service or mail during this event.