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sorry, but I don't think I've ever seen any virtual server hosting provider that went further than this. most don't even mention paying you back for lost time,

sorry, but I don't think I've ever seen any virtual server hosting provider that went further than this. most don't even mention paying you back for lost time, and instead will just give a 99.9% figure without saying what the rolling time on that % is. To be fair, neither are linode, but at least they offer your money back, most don't.

martey 17y ago
Slicehost's "SLA" is even sillier than the 99.9 percenters: Here’s our SLA: we’ll do our best to keep your machines running smoothly for as long as possible and get them up ASAP should something go wrong.
- mrkurt 17y ago
  SLA's are pretty silly and useless, as a rule. :) They're really only worth caring about if they can get you out of some long term contract. They'll never be good enough to counteract the losses you'll suffer from downtime.
  - wisty 17y ago
    SLA's are not useless, they are just useless for commodity hosting. If (say) the NYSE was negotiating for a host, they would make sure they had an SLA that gave massive damages if the host failed. But for commodity hosting, the provider writes the contract. There is no way they are going to expose themselves to your losses other than a fixed refund for the time you lost. Not just because of the costs, but because the costs would be a PITA to calculate. If Twitter goes down and alienates its customers, how would you calculate the damage?
    - waleedka 17y ago
      Agreed. However, I'd use a different example to emphasize the point considering that Twitter's fail whale stories are legendary. I'd stick with NYSE.
    - mrkurt 17y ago
      Even "SLAs with teeth" are pretty useless, speaking as someone who's been involved in negotiating them (on both sides). Like I said, the most useful thing you can get from an SLA is a contract out. Even the NYSE is never going to recoup anything close to their real costs from an outage. You don't ensure uptime with SLAs, you pick good providers and go for redundancy.
      - ams6110 17y ago
        Additionally such agreements (essentially "insurance" against downtime losses) are only as good as your willingness to enforce them. Likely you'll be going to court over anything significant, and paying $100/hr or more to your team of attorneys.
stingraycharles 17y ago
but at least they offer your money back, most don't. Well, my point is that this money back is basically worthless: say, at some point, your server was down for 4 hours, and you pay $100 / month. This means you would get $0.55 refund for 4 hours of downtime. I'm sorry, but to me that sounds like "we guarantee this amount of uptime, and we back it up by absolutely nothing!". Not that I expect my damages to be repaid, not at all, but a webhost's availability guarantees are only as good as the money they put in to back it up. If they would, for example, promise to pay back a month of service fees, it would not recover my damages, but at least shows they're a lot more serious about the guarantees they're giving. Anyway, I do not have anything against Linode, not at all: it's just that I'm wary whenever a webhost is this unclear about availability guarantees. I probably had a few too many bad experiences in the past.

martey 17y ago

Slicehost's "SLA" is even sillier than the 99.9 percenters: Here’s our SLA: we’ll do our best to keep your machines running smoothly for as long as possible and get them up ASAP should something go wrong.

mrkurt 17y ago
SLA's are pretty silly and useless, as a rule. :) They're really only worth caring about if they can get you out of some long term contract. They'll never be good enough to counteract the losses you'll suffer from downtime.
- wisty 17y ago
  SLA's are not useless, they are just useless for commodity hosting. If (say) the NYSE was negotiating for a host, they would make sure they had an SLA that gave massive damages if the host failed. But for commodity hosting, the provider writes the contract. There is no way they are going to expose themselves to your losses other than a fixed refund for the time you lost. Not just because of the costs, but because the costs would be a PITA to calculate. If Twitter goes down and alienates its customers, how would you calculate the damage?
  - waleedka 17y ago
    Agreed. However, I'd use a different example to emphasize the point considering that Twitter's fail whale stories are legendary. I'd stick with NYSE.
  - mrkurt 17y ago
    Even "SLAs with teeth" are pretty useless, speaking as someone who's been involved in negotiating them (on both sides). Like I said, the most useful thing you can get from an SLA is a contract out. Even the NYSE is never going to recoup anything close to their real costs from an outage. You don't ensure uptime with SLAs, you pick good providers and go for redundancy.
    - ams6110 17y ago
      Additionally such agreements (essentially "insurance" against downtime losses) are only as good as your willingness to enforce them. Likely you'll be going to court over anything significant, and paying $100/hr or more to your team of attorneys.

stingraycharles 17y ago

but at least they offer your money back, most don't. Well, my point is that this money back is basically worthless: say, at some point, your server was down for 4 hours, and you pay $100 / month. This means you would get $0.55 refund for 4 hours of downtime. I'm sorry, but to me that sounds like "we guarantee this amount of uptime, and we back it up by absolutely nothing!". Not that I expect my damages to be repaid, not at all, but a webhost's availability guarantees are only as good as the money they put in to back it up. If they would, for example, promise to pay back a month of service fees, it would not recover my damages, but at least shows they're a lot more serious about the guarantees they're giving. Anyway, I do not have anything against Linode, not at all: it's just that I'm wary whenever a webhost is this unclear about availability guarantees. I probably had a few too many bad experiences in the past.