I seems like every webhosting company seems to offer a "99.9% Uptime" claim. Anyone can say anything. How can one determine if these claims are legitimate? Is there any unbiased service I can use to find the uptime logs for the past year? Six months?

This is where we send our clients. Its a page with monitoring services. It lets them keep us honest with our 99% Guarantee. :-)

http://www.assortedinternet.com/hosting/faq/faq-monitoring.jsp

Take care,

Brian

i see the 99.XXX whatever guarantees as insurance rather than an indication that you will get this.
there are several services out there that do it for free with differing levels of success, ive had qk mail me saying a site was down while i was posting on the forum on that site, gospel they are not, a useful tool they are.also youll find that most reptable hosts will deliver 100% uptime for most months, and the occasional month of 95%, and remember all hosts need to take servers down momentarily from time to time for maintenance \ upgrades \ adding features etc.

The guarantee means that you don't pay for less than 99.9% uptime, not that you will have 99.9% uptime. No host can guarantee 99.9% uptime, if they try to tell you that they can, they are lying. I worked for one of the biggest hosting companies in the world, and they spent millions of dollars a year paying out that uptime guarantee. As stated previously, some hosts are happy to tell you when this happens, others have much fine print, and will do anything possible to avoid paying you for downtime.

read the fine print

-Dan