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My 2-cents: I think a lot of us would like FastMail to have 99.999% scheduled uptime, or 5 minutes downtime a year. As I understand it, "five nines" is the threshold demanded for most server applications.
Regarding Fastmail, FM's mail-queue and ISP seem to have a 99.999+% uptime -- incoming mail almost never bounces. However, outgoing mail has issues (spamcop), and server uptime seems more like 99.9% which is fine for government work, but too low for business power users.
I'm not a computer reliability engineer, but my guess is that it's unrealistic to expect FM to maintain 99.999% uptime when there are frequent updates/upgrades to the software/hardware, and a quickly growing userbase. It's a tradeoff.
What can be done about this? The options I can think of are:
1) tolerate the 99.9% uptime
2) host critical accounts on a dedicated server
3) host noncritical accounts on a beta server
4) give in and pay spamcop the $1000 or whatever it takes to keep FM off their blacklist
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