Service Reliability and Uptime History

This question asks about your track record of keeping your service running smoothly. Enterprise buyers want to know if you've had any major outages, data breaches, or other incidents that stopped customers from using your product. They're evaluating whether your service is reliable enough for their business operations and if you can be trusted to maintain availability when they depend on you.

Your uptime history directly impacts customer trust and purchase decisions. Companies with documented 99.9%+ uptime close enterprise deals 3x faster than those with spotty reliability records. Even one significant unplanned outage can derail a six-figure deal if not properly explained. Conversely, demonstrating consistent reliability and transparent incident management can become a competitive advantage, especially against larger competitors who may have more complex, outage-prone systems.

The worst mistake is lying about or hiding past incidents - these always surface during technical diligence. Another pitfall is providing uptime numbers without context or documentation to back them up. Companies also err by not distinguishing between planned maintenance and unplanned outages, or by not explaining how they've improved since any past incidents.