We are occasionally asked why Hen’s Teeth Network does not offer a Service Level Agreement or “SLA” on our hosting products. We do not offer an SLA for two reasons:
- If your web site is down, the cost of hosting and the monetary credit you receive under most SLA’s is an insignificant portion of the lost revenue.
- Until you move into the marketplace for true high availability computing, the SLA’s offered by most hosting companies have so many exceptions that they are worthless.
In lieu of an SLA, we offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee.
Hen’s Teeth Network is a gold level reseller of Verio’s web hosting products. We have been hosting exclusively with Verio since 2002, have been extremely pleased with the service, and recommend nothing else for our clients. I think that Verio’s SLA is typical of the industry so I will use it as an example. Were we to offer an SLA, it would follow this one exactly.
First, the numbers: There are 730.5 hours in an average month so the maximum downtime is calculated from that figure.
- 99.9 to 100% availability – maximum of 0:43 downtime – 0% credit
- 98% to 99.8% – 14:36 downtime – 10% credit
- 95% to 97.9% – 36:31 (1.5 days) downtime – 20% credit
- 90% to 94.9% – 73:03 (3 days) downtime – 50% credit
- 89.9% or below – 100% credit
If the machine crashes and Verio reboots it and runs fsck to clean up the file system and it is back in 40 minutes (a very reasonable expectation), you get nothing. If it takes longer to reboot, up to 14 hours, which is more than a full business day, you get a whopping 10% credit.
Let’s take that a step further and look at two typical payment scenarios. Many of our clients use our Signature hosting accounts which cost $19 per month. Would anyone be served if we credited their account, or sent them a check, for $1.90? Some of our clients use Managed Private Servers (dedicated servers) which cost $325 per month. Were we to send them $32.50, would it even begin to make up for the lost business of being down for a business day?
Second, the exceptions: Verio’s SLA excludes (and this is typical of the industry), “scheduled maintenance and emergency maintenance and upgrades” and “circumstances beyond Verio’s reasonable control including… attacks or hackers….” In other words, if the downtime is caused by “maintenance,” even if the maintenance takes much longer than expected and runs from the middle-of-the-night-maintenance-window into the following business day, it doesn’t count. More to the point, if the downtime is caused by hackers, it doesn’t count. This hacker exclusion means that if your web site is infested with malware and becomes unusable; or if some miscreant launches a DOS (denial-of-service) attack against another site hosted on the same physical machine as hosts your own site, and your site becomes unusable, it doesn’t count.
In the 15 years that I have been hosting web sites in various capacities, downtime is virtually never caused by the sorts of things covered by SLA’s. They offer a false sense of security.
In the seven years that I have been hosting with Verio, the reliability has been outstanding. Irrespective of the SLA and the exclusions, our clients’ web sites and email have simply “been there” when needed. I have every expectation that that will continue to be true. Exceptional reliability is one of the key reasons why I selected Verio as our hosting provider.
