

Guarantees, SLAs, and Hollow Promises - nkohari
http://kohari.org/2009/12/07/guarantees-slas-and-hollow-promises/

======
wgj
The usefulness of an SLA is not the refund to the customer. It is the cost to
the provider, which if painful enough, assures the customer that the provider
has incentive to keep the service up.

This blog post says, in so many words, they would rather not be bound by such
incentives. (and they are seeking customers who have no such requirements.)

~~~
nkohari
Sort of... the point was more that the promises are pretty hollow in the first
place. We don't need financial penalties being applied to motivate us to keep
our service up, at least beyond the natural loss of customers if we were to be
down for an extended period of time. I think offering anything beyond that,
for a service as low-cost as ours, would be lying to our customers.

~~~
wgj
Agreed, and lying is never a great idea. But you also specifically noted that
you do not invest in the kind of solutions that help ensure better uptime
stats. And other sites that have failover and other HA techniques are not
making empty promises. They are showing that they intend to try harder, and
your blog post so much as admits they really do try harder (with more
expensive architecture, and the willingness to be penalized on failure.)

So, regardless of the icing on the cake, you seek customers who do not rely on
uptime. That's a valid choice, and I mean no disrespect. I'm just calling it
what it is.

~~~
nkohari
I suppose you're right. We felt that it was more worthwhile to price our
services lower and avoid going overboard with HA, because our application is
arguably not "mission-critical". If it's down for awhile, it's bad, but no one
dies and money is probably not lost (at least not a lot).

The investments we do make in infrastructure are geared more towards disaster
recovery, because if we went down and lost our customers' data, it _would_ be
a much more critical failure on our part.

~~~
wgj
Emphasize low cost then. That's a great selling point. But it's not reasonable
to say SLAs are hollow. It detracts from your offering.

