Importance of a SLA

[D. Strout]

A lot of us here buy VPSes in the low-end "market". In this market, there aren't as many hosts offering an SLA as there are on the high end. But how much does an SLA mean to you guys? Do you look for one in the TOS? Do you require one? How much uptime do you look for or expect in a $1-15/month VPS? How many times have you claimed credit due to an SLA clause?

I'm curious because I was just running the numbers, and if you think that some hosts guarantee 99.99% uptime, that's still over 7 hours of downtime a month! If you have any application that requires very high availability, you're going to need at least 99.999% uptime, or no more than 43 minutes of downtime. Is that the case?

 

[MannDude]

Most SLAs are designed to look like they offer you something good, but 9 times out of 10 they're truly shit and never apply to the cause or reason why your VPS was down. (At least in my experience). For example, the SLA may only cover downtime due to network outages. But the 12 hours your VPS was down due the node getting wonky, being rebooted, and a prolonged disk check won't apply.

I never try to claim SLA credits unless it's something extremely bizarre and prolonged on a server I care about. I can live with a bit of downtime here and there depending on what the cause is. If it's negligence from the provider, I'm a little less patient but if it's just "could happen to anyone" type of things, I'm a bit more understanding and won't be "that guy" who tickets in and says, "MY SERVER HAS BEEN DOWN FOR  30 MINUTES YOU ARE COSTING ME TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS PER SECOND IT IS DOWN!!!" ... Don't be that guy. Everyone hates that guy.

 

[mikho]

If a company writes a "proper" SLA they can basicly turn off your VPS for a whole month without paying a cent.


It's like any other legal mumbo-jumbo document that only laywers would understand.


I've asked for SLA credit a few times when I was working with the server and it goes dark on me.


If I never notice the downtime then why credit?


Most of my servers are for personal projects and tests so in that case it doesn't matter if it is unavailable a few minutes a month.

 

[lbft]

Ultimately I don't feel like the SLAs you see offered make much difference - downtime costs a lot more (in admin time or stress or lost business) than the little bit of SLA credit you get.

Someone might argue that a company is more likely to have better uptime if their money is on the line, but in my experience any good provider is going to care about uptime for the sake of protecting their business anyway.

 

[KuJoe]

We offer a 99.9% SLA and will issue up to a full month's credit if the downtime exceeds ~44 minutes per month. The "catch" is that the client has to request the SLA as we don't issue them automatically (I've explained why in the past and why it benefits clients when we don't automatically issue SLA credits, I'll try to find the post if I can) but we inform them when they can request it so all they really need to do is open a ticket and reference the announcement/e-mail to get it (assuming they were actually offline, we have clients who request SLAs when other nodes that they don't have service on go offline).

Just a correction in the OP, here's the downtime threshold to meet 99.9% uptime:

8.76 hours per year

43.8 minutes per month

10.1 minutes per week

Here's a nice table.

 

[Dylan]

I'm curious because I was just running the numbers, and if you think that some hosts guarantee 99.99% uptime, that's still over 7 hours of downtime a month! If you have any application that requires very high availability, you're going to need at least 99.999% uptime, or no more than 43 minutes of downtime.

KuJoe linked a nice table already but yeah, your numbers are (literally) a hundred times higher than they should be.

99.99% uptime is 4 minutes and 23 seconds of downtime a month. 99.999% is just 26.3 seconds. It's 99% that's 7h18m and 99.9% that's 43m50s.

 

[D. Strout]

Ahh yes, my bad on the numbers. Percentages confuse me sometimes. Good answers, though, thanks for the insight.

 

[drmike]

SLA's have their purpose. 

Around here, with many of the companies, SLAs are ripped and stripped theftware or photocopy docs borrowed from elsewhere.

I read SLA's, AUP, etc. style docs all the time and laugh.

A SLA is a GUARANTEE.  It is there to BOLSTER customer confidence.   It's much like a warranty on a physical product.

A company failing to properly credit for downtime when their SLA says they should be are committing fraud.  The customer requesting such in cases of failure I am alright with and should be legally compliant.

Big picture, many if not most VPS companies aren't real businesses.  They paint fascades with such documents to appear legitimate.

I encourage everyone to review all documents before giving a provider your money.  I encourage you also to review Warranty on any product you purchase, prior to purchase.  When you are not receiving your paid for product / not functioning properly, demand what they agreed to in said docs.

 

[raindog308]

I don't consider SLAs when making a decision, at least not in this arena.

If my service is down and I get a credit...great, but I'd prefer it didn't go down.  If I was running something really important, then I'd probably have to engineer some kind of high availability and I wouldn't need your SLA.

The plain truth is that if you're down more than I want, I'm leaving and I don't want or need credits to use more of something that isn't working.

 

[concerto49]

SLA's have their purpose. 

Around here, with many of the companies, SLAs are ripped and stripped theftware or photocopy docs borrowed from elsewhere.

I read SLA's, AUP, etc. style docs all the time and laugh.

A SLA is a GUARANTEE.  It is there to BOLSTER customer confidence.   It's much like a warranty on a physical product.

A company failing to properly credit for downtime when their SLA says they should be are committing fraud.  The customer requesting such in cases of failure I am alright with and should be legally compliant.

Big picture, many if not most VPS companies aren't real businesses.  They paint fascades with such documents to appear legitimate.

I encourage everyone to review all documents before giving a provider your money.  I encourage you also to review Warranty on any product you purchase, prior to purchase.  When you are not receiving your paid for product / not functioning properly, demand what they agreed to in said docs.

This. Not sure about consumers, but for businesses SLAs are where to look. Otherwise everything is the same. Everyone wants to of course reduce downtime, but it's about what measures they have in place. Everyone can claim 100% SLA if they want. There's a difference between claiming and putting measures in place.

SLA when used proper is a means to tell someone how much effort you put in. Of course there are those that abuse the system and pretend to have SLA. There's a difference.

 

[bizzard]

For me, a proper SLA shows the company's commitment towards the customer on their service. 

The only place I have asked for SLA refund was with BlueVM, when their service went down frequently almost an year back, just to make them clear that I was monitoring it and their quality of service that time was not acceptable.

Few companies have issued SLA credits or free usage for a month or two, even without asking when their services went down. Those include RamNode, BuyVM and ScalaHosting.