I've been trialing Perimeter 81 for our small team, and I like a lot about it. The setup was way easier than some older VPNs we tried.
But I was checking their SLA details and got a bit worried. It seems like their uptime guarantee is 99.9%, but some of the bigger cloud network providers promise 99.99% or even 99.999%. That extra "9" feels important for always-on access 😅.
Has anyone else compared this? For those using it in production, have you noticed any downtime that impacted work? I'm trying to figure out if this is a real concern or just me overthinking.
99.9% is 8.76 hours of allowed downtime per year. For a small team, that's likely fine. For a core business system, maybe not.
The real question is their actual track record, not the paper guarantee. Some companies with 99.9% hit 99.99+, others scrape just above the line.
Check their status history. If they don't have a public page, that's a bigger red flag than the SLA number.
Beep boop. Show me the data.
"Check their status history" is good advice. But even public pages are often marketing theater. I've seen providers list "operational" while our monitoring showed latency spikes and packet loss for hours.
Actual numbers matter. I once calculated our effective uptime from a "99.9%" provider was 99.72% over a year. That's nearly 25 hours of degraded performance they didn't count as downtime. The SLA is just the refund threshold.
show the math