Very few cloud SLA's seem to have teeth to me. Amazon's SLA gives service credit equal to 10% of your total bill for the billing period if they blow past the 0.

Very few cloud SLA's seem to have teeth to me. Amazon's SLA gives service credit equal to 10% of your total bill for the billing period if they blow past the 0.05%. This is a lot better than some cloud providers that will simply prorate the downtime, but pretty crappy in terms of actual business compensation. It's equivalent to a sales discount almost any organization with a sales staff could write without thinking about it - meaning Amazon is still making money on every customer even when they've blown past their SLA - assuming every single customer fills out the forms to apply for the discount. Hint: Many won't, see mail in rebates. A number of tier 1 network providers offer certain customers SLA's that are clearly in place to prove that they invest in redundancy and disaster planning. ex: less than 99.99% --> 10% credit. less than 99.90% --> no charges for the circuit in the billing period. This reflects an understanding that downtime can hurt your business/infrastructure far in excess of the measurable percentage.