Just curious .... 2 times a week? three? Your opinions please.

I'd be concerned more about the length of the downtime than the number of outages, although it certainly wouldn't be good to have 10 seconds of downtime every ten minutes. Hosting companies generally offer an uptime guarantee that specifies what percentage of a month they guarantee their services will be up (e.g. 99.9%).

99.9% uptime allows for 43.2 minutes of downtime each month, which means your site could go down for 10 seconds 260 times per month. That certainly wouldn't be acceptable, even if it was within the uptime % guaranteed.

So, as a nice inconclusive answer, it really depends on how long the outages are and how critical your site is.

Thank you for putting it in further perspective by showing numbers to back up the 99% downtime claim. Reason for me asking this is because of my frustration with my current (new) host for my resller plan. I believe I have experienced at least 8 incidences of downtime in the last week with one of them being more than 3 hours (from the actual time I was made aware of it) and another 2 hours or so today. The host uses the datacenter at EV1 out of Houston.

My concern is that I have been running a lot of advertising campaigns (banners, popunders, adwords, etc) and those don't stop charging you when your site is down. Another site is crucial for use in my business and used by my clients and the downtime in the middle of the day is literally horrifying.

Sounds like you need to move hosts. I would say any downtime that lasts longer than 10 minutes or so is bad and again, if it is one outage at 2am for 1 hour that is not as bad as 20 5-minutes outages at 6pm.

Good luck

Things to consider before you jump ship and leave.

1: Is this the first occurance?
2: How long have you been with them?
3: Has the host performed well up until now?
4: Have thier been reasonable explinations?(IE: upgrades, network maintaince?)
5: Is this a budget host?

Just some thoughts to consider. I can promise you that every host has atleast one time during thier life that causes them to have some downtime, what really matters is how they handle that instance and what they do to correct the issue and prevent it from happening in the future.