Nearly all players in the cloud computing space promise that their services will be available 99.99% of the time, meaning the chances you’ll be without access to cloud services from major firms such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft is just 0.01% of the time. Unfortunately, for Alibaba Cloud, that promise wasn’t good enough, which is why the company just upped the stakes by offering an availability promise of 99.995%. 

The difference between 99.99% and 99.995% is minimal, and it’s unlikely to sway anyone to Alibaba Cloud on its own, but it does showcase the confidence the company has in its uptime. While it may not be a major technical achievement, what the new availability promise does show is Alibaba Cloud’s commitment to customer service, with the company wishing to showcase that its hospitality will go above and beyond that of its competitors. 

The new 99.995% availability commitment is for Alibaba’s Elastic Compute Service (ECS) solution, where users have their services running across multiple availability zones, while those with individual instances will get the slightly lower rate of 99.975%, although Alibaba maintains that that still represents an industry-leading rate. 

Back in February 2018, Alibaba Cloud was the first to push the individual instances availability rate to 99.95%, a year ahead of other major cloud platforms. The announcement of the new SLA is supported by the launch of a 12-month ECS free trial plan for small-to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to help them migrate to the cloud.

Alibaba’s single instance availability commitment beats Microsoft’s Azure, which promises an uptime of 99.9%, while Amazon Web Services won’t even commit to a certain level of service for a single instance. 

“As more IT applications and infrastructures across various industries transition to cloud-native platforms, Alibaba Cloud has the responsibility to ensure our customers can count on even higher levels of availability and reliability as they conduct their business in the cloud,” said Jiangwei Jiang, partner of Alibaba Group, head of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Utility Products. 

“Our industry-leading cloud availability rates are codified in our Service Level Agreement and is part of our commitment to our customers that Alibaba Cloud is a reliable partner that will be there to support their growth ambitions every step of the way.”