This is good for everyone: it prevents a host server that’s down from getting slammed with requests as soon as it comes back online, and it prevents your own machine from wasting too much effort trying to get blood from a stone. But interestingly, it also does not force (or allow) your machine to ever completely give up. Exponential Backoff is also a critical part of networking security, when successive password failures in logging into an account are punished by an exponentially increasing lockout period.
