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Why hosting uptime guarantees are usually worthless
- lazyant 16y agoI don't know of any hosting company that in case of downtime will give you anything more than the money back (prorated for the duration of the downtime for example); basically their liability is limited to the fee in their ToS.
- Terretta 16y agoThe $2,000/hour * 10 hours example shows flawed customer thinking. A guarantee involving cash payback puts too much responsibility on the hosting provider, and not enough on the customer. A customer is responsible for establishing the appropriate redundancy for his business. If his business uptime is so incredibly vital, generating $2,000 an hour, then $1,000 in hosting a month is a ridiculously low investment. Google's MSA offers credits in the form of days of additional hosting service for moments of service unreachability. This is a guarantee that puts the burden of service where it should be. Google is responsible for providing a service. If they don't, they'll do much more of the same work for the customer at Google's cost. And the service is what it is. Google doesn't want to have to give away services, so they try to make it work. But the customer is responsible for choosing commercially appropriate levels of hosting and replication and redundancy. Only the customer can decide how bulletproof he wants it to be, at what cost. Frankly, online hosting customers should operate as though there is no hosting guarantee at all, and plan their web business bulletproofing costs according to their appetite for dealing with the reality that the Internet breaks.