electrum and multibit reliability

[accord01]

Both are good wallets... however, both also rely on servers if I am correct.  In the event that the servers went down.. data on the servers lost... will we be able to recover and still have access to the coins?

[ThomasV]

only Electrum relies on servers.
if servers were down or unreachable, you could still export your private keys from Electrum, and import them in another client.

[btcven]

Both are good wallets... however, both also rely on servers if I am correct.  In the event that the servers went down.. data on the servers lost... will we be able to recover and still have access to the coins?

Your seed (carrying all your private keys) are always client side and are never sent to the server.