Linux hosting: is it reliable?
Anybody who decides to use Linux hosting for their website is likely to be concerned about the reliability of the operating system, since everything else they do on the machine depends on it. In fact, that is a very hard question to answer, as reliability is very specific to the environment and no two environments are the same. As a result, the reliability experts measure results based on Mean Time between Failure (MTBF). This metric is the time between two failures of the system. Interestingly, this is not an accurate metric either, since a failure and visible symptoms of the failure might not happen at the same time. As a result, this metric is likely to be skewed. In such cases, what can a user do? Users should focus on getting similar metrics for the environment they are trying to set up their servers in and apply statistical analysis to calculate the MTBF and see if the numbers they find are within the tolerance limits of their businesses.