If you are responsible for EDI operations or oversee technology budgets, you probably see uptime claims like 99.998% on every vendor’s pitch deck. But what does a number that precise really mean for your business when you have orders, payments, and shipments flowing daily? Understanding this helps you set expectations, define requirements, and, when the time is right, make the switch to a more cost-effective or reliable Value Added Network (VAN).
When a VAN advertises 99.998% uptime, you are looking at roughly 10.5 minutes of downtime across the entire year. Breaking it down further, that comes out to less than a minute each month. For context, 99.9% uptime would mean nearly nine hours of downtime annually, while 99.0% would be over three days. If your operation leans hard on EDI, even a few extra minutes of outage can snowball into missed shipments or unhappy customers.
On paper, uptime is an engineering metric. In practice, its impact is felt every time a scheduled order does not reach the warehouse, a trading partner misses a window, or a financial penalty is triggered by a missed electronic acknowledgment. Here is what you face when EDI is down for even a few minutes beyond the norm:
While a minute here or there can usually be absorbed, longer interruptions quickly translate to real financial and reputational impact. You may find it useful to review our in-depth look at the true business impact of EDI downtime to put numbers behind these risks.
The difference between a true 99.998% uptime experience and a theoretical claim mainly comes from infrastructure and operations. To achieve this level of reliability, modern VAN providers invest in:
You can ask a VAN for evidence of these practices during your vendor evaluation.
It is smart to look past headline claims and ask for details on:
If you are evaluating an EDI platform, also examine how openly they share real status data with you. A real-time dashboard exposing message status and delivery health is no longer a luxury. We built this kind of visibility into Nexus VAN’s migration and management tools because everyone deserves to know exactly where they stand.
Having a VAN "up" is step one. What matters to you on the ground is whether data gets through promptly, is acknowledged, and can be traced. The following metrics round out a complete reliability picture:
Tracking these indicators reveals whether your VAN partner is a silent pipeline or a potential source of daily support tickets and fire drills. For a deep dive into these metrics, see our blog on EDI performance KPIs.
Let’s break down the difference with scenarios most teams face:
Both SLAs say "connectivity provided," but in reality, your risks and daily impact are worlds apart.
If you are considering a move to save on costs or improve service, reliability always ranks as the top fear. Based on our years helping companies in EDI, we recommend this structured evaluation:
You can find more guidance in our post on key signs it is time to switch your VAN provider.
The migration process tends to cause the most anxiety, and rightly so. We have found successful migrations always start by documenting every trading partner, connection, and message type, then using parallel runs—where documents flow through both old and new systems together—before executing a phased cutover. This approach gives you the safety net to test without jeopardizing ongoing operations. We have made this a central focus of our onboarding process with an intuitive migration dashboard that tracks each step in real time. You can explore our approach to minimizing risk during migration in this blog on EDI migration strategy.
On top of reliability, most businesses are under pressure to get predictable EDI costs, especially when working with legacy or traditional VAN billing models. The traditional VAN billing models often create confusion with setup fees, mailbox fees, overage penalties, and padded document sizes.
With a kilo-character billing model, you only pay for the exact volume of data you send and nothing more. That means if your data usage varies, your bill reflects actual usage—without surprises. Nexus VAN’s plans are structured with clear monthly rates, and there are no separate charges for setup, mailbox, or migration. For a breakdown of VAN fee structures and what to watch out for, see our guide to EDI VAN billing costs.
You might ask whether your business really needs five nines of availability. That answer usually comes down to your customer requirements, order volumes, and risk tolerance. If a single hour of downtime triggers thousands in chargebacks or missed freight, the answer is likely yes. For others, lower uptime may be tolerable but only if you have flexible processes and partners. We recommend asking yourself:
By quantifying these impacts, you can build a clear business case for minimum uptime requirements—and ensure you are truly getting what you pay for.
We strongly advise running a parallel test before you switch. Most modern EDI solutions make this straightforward. You select a group of trading partners and start sending test or real traffic through both systems. During a free trial or evaluation window, you will see if claims around uptime, delivery speed, and support match your needs, supported by your own real-life traffic. With our team at Nexus VAN, for instance, we make this testing phase standard so you can assess performance before making a commitment.
As you weigh EDI VAN options, focus on the true practical meaning of 99.998% uptime—not just as a technical number, but as an indicator of near-constant availability for your business. Combine this lens with scrutiny on delivery metrics, transparency tools, migration safety, and, importantly, billing structure. With transparent pricing, guaranteed visibility into your operations, and risk-free migration, you can trim inflated costs and sidestep downtime headaches.
If you are ready to evaluate your options or simply want to benchmark your current setup, you can always connect with us at Nexus VAN for a detailed walk-through or risk-free trial.
