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Huh? The flakiness of a standard uplink will have you down for 44 hours a year? On what planet? With our non-AWS hosting providers we tend to see 2-4 hours of network issues per year. Heroku's uptime also hasn't historically been anywhere near 99.97%. They were down for several days last year in The Great AWS Failure.

This is in the context of hosting it yourself, not using a different large-scale business provider.

I don't think anyone ever considers hosting it on a desktop in the closet on DSL at home/office.

The competition for something like Heroku is EC2, VPS, or dedicated servers, in commercial colocation facilities. A good hosting facility is going to be a lot closer to 99.995% uptime for network and power to the box, but you can of course screw up past that point on your own.

It's not that easy to get to even 99.5%

99.9% is very doable. If your sites have less then you should consider hiring better staff.

Also the heroku figure (99.97%) is a lie - just skim their status-page.

Having administered several "standard uplinks" from 100 Mbit/sec all the way to multiple ten Gbit/sec links, I can safely say that if your transit isn't 99.999%, you need new transit.