Don't most web hosts guarantee 99.99% uptime?

Yes, most of them do. And you'll notice that a good number of the web host uptimes that we recorded fall below that. The percentage provided by web hosts gives users a baseline uptime. If your site is unreachable for less than that time, they may choose to compensate you for the time your site was unreachable. Uptime and downtime guarantees are misnomers though, as web hosts can have outages that they don't consider to be downtime (such as acts of god, or planned maintenance). Also, you often have to report the downtime as it occurs, and not after the fact. Our downtime figures are total downtime figures, and should be used to give an idea of a web host's general reliability.

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