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Wimpy SLAs. If you've read Chapter 10 of my new book, you know how ridiculous I think the current state of affairs in SLAs is. On behalf of a client, I recently had occassion to review WorldCom's SLAs for shared hosting and managed hosting. I don't want to pick on WorldCom. At least they put their SLAs on line for all to see. And their SLAs are no worse than most others I read. But SLAs like WorldCom's are just about worthless. Just some pet peeves:
- Scheduled Maintenance. The shared-hosting SLA includes 28 hours per week of potential scheduled maintenance time during which you can't complain and have no rights in case your web site is down. IOW, 17% of your uptime is up for grabs.
- Outages. Again in the shared-hosting SLA, a problem isn't considered an outage unless it lasts at least one hour. Your server could be re-booted every 20 minutes, and take another ten just to come up. 50% downtime, and it's all "okay."
- Remedies. And if your server is unavailable for the entire month, what do you get? You'll get a credit for one entire week, thank you very much. And you have to ask for the credit--it's not automatic. And you won't get a credit for the bandwidth you paid for and didn't use while your server was down.
I could go on and on, and I do in my book, but the fact is that these SLAs are a joke. And like I say, it's not just WorldCom--they're all like this. Think I'm nuts? Imagine if you bought a new car and the warranty read something like this: "We guarantee that this car will run forever, but if it doesn't, we'll fix it for free for the first five years or 50,000 miles whichever comes first. That is, except for a few minor inconveniences: (1) With advance notice, we may disable it for up to 17% of the time. But don't worry. That will only happen when you don't need it very much. (2) If your car turns out to be a lemon, and we can't keep it running, we'll give you back an entire 25% of what you paid for it! (Fine print: We'll also have to charge you a fee for the miles you weren't able to drive while your car was out of service."
Think I'm nuts? Ask any web-hosting vendor and they'll tell you it would never happen like that. Their SLAs are far more conservative than their actual performance history. Oh yeah? Well why don't they make their SLAs more closely resemble the claims they make during the sales cycle? My car's warranty exactly matches the service I expect from the dealer. No more; no less. Why isn't this the case for SLAs?
Posted Saturday, March 09, 2002 5:12:15 PM 
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