Why do companies lie about uptime?

uptimereliabilityconversion_rate_optimization

Synthesized Answer

Based on 1 community responses

Companies may exaggerate their uptime for various reasons, primarily driven by marketing and sales goals. High uptime percentages are often perceived as a measure of reliability and trustworthiness, which can be a significant selling point, especially in industries where downtime can have severe consequences or financial losses. However, achieving and maintaining extremely high uptime percentages can be challenging due to various factors such as hardware failures, software bugs, and external factors like natural disasters or cyberattacks.

Key Takeaways

Uptime is a key reliability metric
Marketing pressures can lead to exaggerated claims
Achieving high uptime is challenging due to various factors

Discussion (1 comments)

Showing 1 comments

haar

about 1 month ago

Why do companies lie about their uptime?

I'm not trying to call out Sentry.io specifically here, I'm just using them as the example because it happened today. In fact, in general I'm a happy customer of theirs.

I'm trying to understand the motivations behind companies that aren't open about their uptime (or other issues, such as data breaches etc).

Why is it not encouraged/rewarded (or perceived as such) to be up front and open about these things? It seems that amongst the HN crowd it has been valued, and folks are appreciative and supportive of these things (vocally and with their wallets) - so why is it not more common practice?

View on Hacker NewsHN ID: 46087321Classification: qa

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