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SLA is overrated. SLA mostly relates to "unplanned downtime" so if you need to often fix things, just schedule downtime, mess around with it and bring it back u

SLA is overrated. SLA mostly relates to "unplanned downtime" so if you need to often fix things, just schedule downtime, mess around with it and bring it back up. Also, we have seen both cloud and non-cloud hosts having significant downtime more than their SLA but just put it down to a "small subset of our customers" so they don't have to do anything. It's a bit like my Student Loan guarantee, "Do the paperwork and we guarantee you will have the loan on time". The loan was not paid, "I thought you guaranteed it?" "We do but we made a mistake" "So what do I get because of the guarantee?" "Nothing". Cheers!

chrismorgan 4y ago
I have never seen a publicly-advertised SLA practically worth anything, by my reckoning—whether offered to all customers or an extra that you’d pay for. (Privately-arranged SLAs I can’t comment on. They could potentially have actually meaningful penalties.) Vultr’s, as an example I’m familiar with, being a customer, but which I believe is pretty typical: • 100% uptime, except for up to ten minutes’ downtime (per event) with 24 hours’ notice or if they decide there was a time-critical patch or update. (I have one VPS with Vultr, and got notice of possible outages—identified purely by searching “vultr service alert” in my email—8× in 2022, 3× in 2021, 14× in 2020, 9× in 2019. No idea how many of them led to actual outage.) • They’ll give you credits according to a particular schedule, 24–144× as much as the outage time (capped at a month’s worth after a 7h outage, which is actually considerably better than most SLAs I’ve ever read). Never mind the fact that if you’re running business on this and actually depending on the SLA, you’re probably losing a lot more than what you’re going to get credited for. • Onus of reporting outages and requesting credits is on you, by submitting a support ticket manually and explicitly requesting credit. So the vast majority of SLA breaches (>99.9%, I expect; I don’t care to speculate how many more nines could be added) will never actually be compensated. And determination of whether an eligible outage occurred is at their sole discretion, so that they could frankly get away with denying everything all the time if they wanted to. Such SLAs basically just completely lack fangs. I suppose you’d want something along the lines of insurance instead of an SLA, if it all mattered to you.

chrismorgan 4y ago

I have never seen a publicly-advertised SLA practically worth anything, by my reckoning—whether offered to all customers or an extra that you’d pay for. (Privately-arranged SLAs I can’t comment on. They could potentially have actually meaningful penalties.) Vultr’s, as an example I’m familiar with, being a customer, but which I believe is pretty typical: • 100% uptime, except for up to ten minutes’ downtime (per event) with 24 hours’ notice or if they decide there was a time-critical patch or update. (I have one VPS with Vultr, and got notice of possible outages—identified purely by searching “vultr service alert” in my email—8× in 2022, 3× in 2021, 14× in 2020, 9× in 2019. No idea how many of them led to actual outage.) • They’ll give you credits according to a particular schedule, 24–144× as much as the outage time (capped at a month’s worth after a 7h outage, which is actually considerably better than most SLAs I’ve ever read). Never mind the fact that if you’re running business on this and actually depending on the SLA, you’re probably losing a lot more than what you’re going to get credited for. • Onus of reporting outages and requesting credits is on you, by submitting a support ticket manually and explicitly requesting credit. So the vast majority of SLA breaches (>99.9%, I expect; I don’t care to speculate how many more nines could be added) will never actually be compensated. And determination of whether an eligible outage occurred is at their sole discretion, so that they could frankly get away with denying everything all the time if they wanted to. Such SLAs basically just completely lack fangs. I suppose you’d want something along the lines of insurance instead of an SLA, if it all mattered to you.