I want to put into place a 99.5% uptime guarantee, but what would the terms/restrications that i need be? I know that acts of god are covered alot, but what about terroristic acts? That is a pretty big field of cover. I just wondered what you guys covered in your agreements, or what you have seen. Also would like to know if 99.5% would/should be over a years period or over the customers period of service.

Originally posted by interseen
I want to put into place a 99.5% uptime guarantee, but what would the terms/restrications that i need be? I know that acts of god are covered alot, but what about terroristic acts? That is a pretty big field of cover. I just wondered what you guys covered in your agreements, or what you have seen. Also would like to know if 99.5% would/should be over a years period or over the customers period of service.

you can simply offer a network uptime of 99.5 without any problem. that would be a simple promise that the network is on 99.5% of the time.

now given 99.99% of most people don't understand that network uptime means nothing, but you as the retailer can spin a story around it. all networks are to the router at about 99.9 or better.

when you start offering 99.1% or better http uptime, then you are becoming a true to your customer business. now be warned, http uptime is alot different than network uptime, it requires alot more work and more servers skills than most.

Mike

We don't offer uptime guarantees. Simply because in my eyes an "uptime guarantee" is just marketing spin, nothing more. The internet is an unstable and unpredictable platform, so it's silly to be guaranteeing things, that you reasonably can't. If however anyone's not satisfied with our service, I am more than happy to give them a full refund :)

As Mike said, HTTP uptime and network uptime are two completely different things.

I always thought that uptime guarantees were silly too, but some people demand them. I dont want to lose a customer because of a silly game some hosts play

Only offer a guarantee on what you can control. This would include the Server (presuming it is your Server) but not the Network connection.

Uptime Guarantee's are usually based per month with each 00.1% equaling approx 15 minutes. So 99.5% means 5x15 = 75 minutes per month of "unscheduled" downtime. Quite a bit IMO. If you know what you are doing and it's your Server, it's not unresonable to provide; 99.8 / 99.9 or even 99.99 if your Server Admin skills are really good.

Always make sure to give notice of scheduled dowtime; whenever possible. Even reboots take approx 5 minutes for everything to come backup and be available.

we dont guarantee uptime, but we do tell prosepctive clients what the uptime of the server they will be on has been. past performance is worth more than 1000 empty promises.

Are uptime guarantee woth anything without a Service Level Aggrement?

no, they are not. they aren't worth anything with an SLA either, unless the company is honest enough to honor it. all the legalese in the world means nothing unless you are dealing with an honest businessperson on the other end.

It can also be said;

"Any Guarantee, written or verbal, is restricted to the spirit of the agreement and the integerity of the parties involved."

Just another reason why Communication is so important. Once Litigation is invoked, "all hell" can break loose. ;)