Host Reliability - Dreamhost Shared Hosting

I have begun a long term uptime monitoring test of the shared hosting of Dreamhost, the host I'd like to move gslounge.com. I am using three uptime monitoring services: Siteuptime.com, Alertra and Wormly. The test version of gslounge.com is currently in the shared hosting at dreamhost. This morning the shared hosting there suffered a twenty minute outage for database reasons.

Let's say there are roughly 525,960 minutes in a 365.25 day year. Per year then:

• 99.999% uptime would give us 525,954 minutes of uptime, or 6 minutes of downtime
• 99.99% uptime would give us 525,907 minutes of uptime, or 53 minutes of downtime
• 99.9% uptime would give us 525,434 minutes of uptime, 8.76 hours of downtime

This list clearly shows that shared hosting on Dreamhost, even if we start counting today, isn't in the "5 9's" category. Continued monitoring may well reveal shared hosting isn't in the four or three nines category of reliability either.

1% downtime works out to around 3 days of downtime per year. How much downtime can gslounge.com handle before students are turned off? My personal answer is that my tolerance for downtime relates directly to how much I rely on the service. GMail downtime kills me but I forgive the service because how superior it is to competitors - and how hard it would be for me to switch to another service.

The sweet spot here is to make gslounge.com as compelling as possible and simultaneously work to find the most rock-solid host (at the best price) as possible. I am not sure how to find other hosts with great uptime other than testing them myself using my hosted pages within their server farm. Anyone have any great ideas?

Thanks,

Brody