One of our old providers (I wont mention which one), where we still have 2 servers (soon to be zero) sent us an email this afternoon.

Basically, they're doing a 'network upgrade' and they're going down on a day in the immediate future for 4 hours.

From midnight to 4PM EST.

so they're going to be inaccessible for 4 hours. and their SLA guarantees 99.5% accessibility.

This means that they've violated their SLA.

Not according to them. Since the outage is 'scheduled', it doesn't count.

What are peoples thoughts on this? I don't agree with their viewpoint.

What do other dedicated hosts do? Is scheduled downtime included in your uptime guarantee?

I'm just glad that less than 1% of our hardware is with this old, unprofessional, and quickly deterorating provider :)

Cheers,

Raj Dutt

I had a similar experience at rackspace recently; they announced that they would be "upgrading a network router" and network connectivity would be down for "up to 6 hours". I was really quite shocked that a company which advertises 99.999% uptime (excluding, of course, scheduled maintainance) would have their network designed in such a manner that they a) had a single point of faliure, and b) couldn't swap in some temporary hardware to keep stuff running while they performed their upgrade.

[Added later:]
To be fair to rackspace, I should mention that this was the only such outage in the past 6 months, and that it only ended up lasting about 1.5 hours. But that still translates into about 20 times as much downtime as you'd expect from their advertising.

[Edited by cperciva on 03-30-2001 at 03:00 AM]

That's amusing.
I guess that's what I'm getting it.

Advertising the legendary 5 9's (I have doubts and proof about their ability to hit that target) is one thing.

Having a 6 hour maintenance window (whether scheduled or unscheduled) is another.

The two just don't gel.

If my business was attracted to Rackspace because of their 5 9's guarantee, and I had invested in ensuring that my hardware was redundant enough to support that uptime level, I'd be extremely upset at a maintenance window that would reduce my expectations from 99.999 to almost 99.000

It seems like only the big, enterprise level providers such as Abovenet and Exodus truely deliver excellent uptime on a consistent basis. Am I wrong? I can think of a lot of medium sized dedicated server company that run their own network that are down for 'hours' for upgrades on a pretty consistent basis.

Cheers,

Raj Dutt

Originally posted by cperciva
I had a similar experience at rackspace recently; they announced that they would be "upgrading a network router" and network connectivity would be down for "up to 6 hours". I was really quite shocked that a company which advertises 99.999% uptime (excluding, of course, scheduled maintainance) would have their network designed in such a manner that they a) had a single point of faliure, and b) couldn't swap in some temporary hardware to keep stuff running while they performed their upgrade.

Regarding the scheduled downtime and uptime guarantee issue. Recently looking for a dedicated provider I did notice that a good portion of them had a clause in their terms stating that scheduled downtime was not covered in the uptime guarantee, however I read several that would make guarantees stating downtimes would be no longer than 2 hours and if they were you would be reimbursed (can't remember which ones offhand).

Regards,

Mike

That's good.

Our current provider is similar, scheduled downtime is kept to a ridiclously low amount.

For example, they recently upgraded a core router. They said that redundant routers would kick in and that there'd be a 3-4 second downtime. They apologized profusely for this.

I found that pretty amusing ;-)

But then again, they're Tier-1 in the true sense of the word and they OWN their backbone.

Originally posted by Phiberop
Regarding the scheduled downtime and uptime guarantee issue. Recently looking for a dedicated provider I did notice that a good portion of them had a clause in their terms stating that scheduled downtime was not covered in the uptime guarantee, however I read several that would make guarantees stating downtimes would be no longer than 2 hours and if they were you would be reimbursed (can't remember which ones offhand).

Regards,

Mike

So, who is your current provider?