mods feel free to move if this is innapropriate for this section.

there is a recent trend in making exclusions thar arent in the spirit of things. i mean it just isnt cricket lads. if your going to offer an SLA and make exclusions make reasonable ones. acts of god are acts of god. thats lightening blowing your wife up, acts above and beyond reasonable blame. hardware failure, fibre cuts etc i dont class, i mean if you have an sla from say verio (only an example) and some chimp messed up then you should be getting recompense, be it from verio if its their chimp, or via verio from the chimp or from the chimp. theres culpability. the phrase acts of god is being abused. hardware failure? could be argued but i doubt it, sure a fan 'could' fail but your supposed to replace em right. sure u didnt start a dos attack on yourself, but its your job as a network provider to stop one. if you sell managed servers security is your job. a hack isnt an act of god. if security is your job and you aint up to scratch then its your fault. pure and simple. how can you say a hack is an act of god lol.
how many house insurance policies state that they wont pay out if you get burgled by a man or a woman or on days ending in Y. ok if you leave the door open the dont pay out. acts of god are excluded, war is excluded, sonic boom is excluded. civil unrest is excluded. they are reasonble things.

any comments people? am i being unreasonable? or do you think its tantamount to advertise an sla and make the terms so they dont every have to pay out?

I was just thinking the exact same thing as I read someones SLA. Where acts of God included telco fiber issues and hard drive failure. They pretty much covered anything that could possibly go wrong in their SLA. The only thing I didn't see is "if NOC Tech Larry spills his Mountain Dew into the box."

I just don't get. Would love for someone to explain how you can list a hard drive failure as an Act of God.

Originally posted by Andyc
. . . . .how you can list a hard drive failure as an Act of God. I certainly don't see how they can list it as such. :rolleyes:
But, if it's clearly in the sla that you agree to, than it is in the sla you agree to.

I'm sure the provider could try and classify an "act of god" as a hard-drive failure.

However:

1) They must define the phrase "act of god" above and beyond what is already stated "truth" in current law cases (i.e. a noc was destroyed as a tornado and someone sued the noc and it was found that their "act of god" clause in the SLA applied).

2) Anyone who signs a contract which lists a hard-drive failure as one of the definitions of "an act of god" needs their head examined.

A contract can "imply" things all it wants, but what matters is what has held up in court, so if someone actually successfully defended the position that a hard-drive failure was indeed an act of god, well, then your SOL :).

Hmm, hard drive failed becasue of devine intervention. Perhaps we should all start worshiping the hard drive god.

hehe thanks thought i was being harsh. personally i feel its borderline false advertising. saying a % uptime but hiding somewhere in the sla that anything at all is excluded.
its like saying 24 7 support, but not defining a sla on how quickly you reply, hell everyone offers 24 7 email support inasmuch that they recieve email 24 7. at the moment i dont say i do, we pretty much some down on any problem quickly. any server outage 24 7 gets stood on. i get paged. inside 5 minutes. helpdesk problems go to the cell phone (think thats what you lot call em :)) as does phone support and its generally set to silent. it either wakes me vibing or doesnt in the few hours im asleep, or it gets a partner or member of staff. but it aint right to call it 24 7 support. give it a few months to put something in place maybe. but what some people consider ok to say is shocking. if you cant deliver or need to hide behind clever wording then its taking buyer beware to far. there needs to be a global industry watchdog to set down standards. sure sla's can differ in terms, thats business, but stating an uptime sla you have no intention of ever paying out against is pure wrong imho.

lol sign me up alan :) offer up worship to the great gods maxtor and seagate. you gotta wonder who miffed off ibm enough to send a plague of deathstar drives tho.

Originally posted by DanielP
. . . . . . Anyone who signs a contract which lists a hard-drive failure as one of the definitions of "an act of god" needs their head examined. . . . . . Exactly. Which is why it doesn't matter if they put it in the SLA. Because, you're the one deciding to do business (or not) with someone that would attempt to hide behind those words.