Imagine a data centre service provider who offers a 100% availability SLA.\u00a0 That’s pretty impressive.\u00a0 Most of us aim for the five 9’s, e.g. 99.999%.\u00a0 99.9% is even good with no more than 60 minutes outage in a month.\u00a0 You’d have to be pretty sure of yourself to offer a 100% SLA.<\/p>\n
For a data centre, that is actually achievable but you cannot cut any<\/em> corners.\u00a0 I’m lucky enough to work with a service provider who can live up to their claim of a 100% SLA.\u00a0 They invested heavily in the building, people and processes to have a Tier IV facility with no single points of failure.\u00a0 They haven’t had an outage since they launched in 2001.\u00a0 As a result their customers can build their brand name on this.\u00a0 We’re able to say that our service extends their philosophy and our service hasn’t had an outage since we launched earlier this year.<\/p>\n But I know of others who do claim a 100% SLA.\u00a0 In fact, one of them is having their 4th major outage in 2.5 years …. right now<\/em> as I type this – if you’re in Ireland it’s not hard to guess who I’m talking about.<\/em>\u00a0 I’m not even counting the little mishaps that they have on a recurring basis … some we know about through web forums, blogs, word of mouth, etc.\u00a0 I’m not going to poke fun at them.\u00a0 There’s some good people in there who’ll be stressed out right now through no fault of theirs.<\/p>\n However, we do have to look at the people responsible for the SLA being offered.\u00a0 Their clients are depending on that SLA.\u00a0 They’ve reflected that to their customers, e.g. if my hosting provider gives me a 99.99% SLA then I can pass that on to my clients.\u00a0 However, if my data centre is up and down like the proverbial w***e’s knickers then I look like mud to my clients, whether they’re internal or external clients.<\/p>\n If you’re looking at a hosting service provider then please check out their SLA. If they claim 100% then that’s very audacious.\u00a0 I’m not saying it’s impossible, just very hard.\u00a0 Look at their track record and see if they live up to it.\u00a0 If not, then can you believe other fantastic claims about senior staff on site 24*7, huge bandwidth, "everything is possible", etc.\u00a0 Here’s what I’d do:<\/p>\n Am I sounding harsh?\u00a0 Honestly, no.\u00a0 We all expect sales people to stretch a little.\u00a0 But taking things this far is too much.\u00a0 Imagine if this stings you?\u00a0 It shuts down your business.\u00a0 If you’re a reseller your clients will blame you, not the hosting company.\u00a0 You’ve got a business reputation to maintain.\u00a0 If you’re in the mission critical world then outages such as this are not tolerable.\u00a0 They can possible kill people.<\/p>\n If you’ve suffered a hosting power outage again in this 365 day period and it’s affected your business then check out an alternative<\/a>.<\/p>\n EDIT:<\/p>\n The hosting company having the outage finally came back online after 2.5 hours – sort of.\u00a0 Some servers are still not responding.\u00a0 Assuming this is their only outage this year (and it wasn’t) that’d give them a 99.97% uptime.<\/p>\n EDIT #2:<\/p>\n I just checked that company’s web site uptime (they host it themselves in their data centre).\u00a0 It’s available 99.87% of the time over the last 2 years and they had 97.74% uptime in September 2008.\u00a0 Not quite 100% or even 99.9%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imagine a data centre service provider who offers a 100% availability SLA.\u00a0 That’s pretty impressive.\u00a0 Most of us aim for the five 9’s, e.g. 99.999%.\u00a0 99.9% is even good with no more than 60 minutes outage in a month.\u00a0 You’d have to be pretty sure of yourself to offer a 100% SLA. For a data … Continue reading “What’s an SLA Worth?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n