What kind of uptime guarentee do you offer and how do you compensate clients if uptime isn't what you promised?

I see a lot of hosts offering things like 99% or 99.999% uptime, but they never say what they would do if uptime falls below that.

I think I've only see one host who said they'd refund 50% of the month's fees if their uptime didn't stay at 99%.

Originally posted by Lexa
What kind of uptime guarentee do you offer and how do you compensate clients if uptime isn't what you promised?

I see a lot of hosts offering things like 99% or 99.999% uptime, but they never say what they would do if uptime falls below that.

I think I've only see one host who said they'd refund 50% of the month's fees if their uptime didn't stay at 99%.

Typically this is defined in a SLA (service level agreement). My company refunds a set percentage per hour after we fall below our guarantee upon request from a customer. Luckily this has happened only one month on only one server out of the past five years. We also go by the % within a monthly time period (which mosts hosts do too); however some hosts are tricky and they go by the life of the server's % (which can by a few years if they have had the server a few years).

To hit or go below 99% uptime, that is a lot of downtime -- too much.

Yea - SOME hosts that offer a 99.x%+ offer a % back for each .1 or something they're down.

One of the mods here (cant remember who) offers 10% back for each .1% up to 100% off for that month - with 99.8% uptime.

Seems to be closer and closer to standard (minus kiddie hosts)

It depends on the severity for us. If it is just over the SLA we will credit for the downtime but have given full months free in the past if the situation calls for it.

It's a judgement call.

I know it's a little drastic, but ours is an all or nothing 99.9% SLA. If we fall below 99.9% for any given month the client is credited for a full month. Fortunately we haven't had any major issues that caused us to fall below 99.9% but it does keep us (at least me) on our toes.

We give a credit towards their next bill (50% of their plan). If it is a long downtime, we offer our customers a free month.