99.9% uptime promise tested
How much does a 99.9% uptime guarantee from your hosting company really mean?
How much does a 99.9% uptime guarantee from your hosting company really mean?
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99.9% uptime promise tested
- Thread starter rpm
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Messugga
Honorary Master
Wow, an article that had some actual effort put in during its creation! Quite a surprise.
Quite interesting all of this. Surely it could be called false advertising, should up-time thresholds not be met, with possible legal ramifications?
Quite interesting all of this. Surely it could be called false advertising, should up-time thresholds not be met, with possible legal ramifications?
SLAs
Always a contentious issue in this country is website hosting and how one can be provided the right service. Of course none really can while we patiently wait for neotel to pull some strings on ths SAT3 cable and trying to land their own, SEACOM. With its own haylo we're all like to think we can grap a piece off. Things won't get better for a bit but they will soon. Hang in there. Your IT business will survive. If you don't have one, register one! www.itsolutions.co.za
Always a contentious issue in this country is website hosting and how one can be provided the right service. Of course none really can while we patiently wait for neotel to pull some strings on ths SAT3 cable and trying to land their own, SEACOM. With its own haylo we're all like to think we can grap a piece off. Things won't get better for a bit but they will soon. Hang in there. Your IT business will survive. If you don't have one, register one! www.itsolutions.co.za
rwenzori
Honorary Master
Agreed. Nice to see a critical investigation for a change.
AirWolf
Honorary Master
Does this have anything to do with the recent frequent down times on MyBB? 
Rouxenator
Dank meme lord
I get 99.9% uptime for R9.99 from host4africa.
Local hosting is just too expensive.
Local hosting is just too expensive.
Prof.Merlin
Expert Member
okay i think gmail just died.
Or its my line
Or its my line
Prof.Merlin
Expert Member
K nvm...seems its SA internet that died
<moLe>
Expert Member
99.9% is grand..but its that 00.1% that get to me
gregmcc
Honorary Master
Great article! 99.9% is just a advertising gimmick. All the stats they release at gipoed anyway!
vodacom3g
Vodacom Representative
SLA's will always be problematic in how they're defined and measured.
From the end-user perspective, things should just work and thus 99.9% would mean the ability to consume the service irrespective of the make up of that service (networks, links, PC, servers, etc.)
Service providers have a more complex situation. While they sell to their customers (and must deliver on a SLA), they buy services from upstream providers (like telcos, content providers, etc.) who must honour their own SLA's.
Obviously the closer to the end-user, the lower the SLA numbers must be if they're the sum total of the higher-up SLA's. But this does not happen as they typically exclude anything 'outside their control'. Not necessarily wrong, but it creates many gray areas.
Thus the biggest hurdle in getting promised SLA's is normally due to the provider having exclusions on how his own SLA is measured.
For example, Telkom was quoted recently that they meet their SLA requirements in providing backhaul. But they failed to mention (and the press failed to ask) how this is calculated.
What few people know is that their SLA excludes any situation outside their control, for example cable theft or 'acts of god'. So if the Telkom cables in your area are stolen and you don't have service for a month, they can still claim a 100% availability for the period.
From the end-user perspective, things should just work and thus 99.9% would mean the ability to consume the service irrespective of the make up of that service (networks, links, PC, servers, etc.)
Service providers have a more complex situation. While they sell to their customers (and must deliver on a SLA), they buy services from upstream providers (like telcos, content providers, etc.) who must honour their own SLA's.
Obviously the closer to the end-user, the lower the SLA numbers must be if they're the sum total of the higher-up SLA's. But this does not happen as they typically exclude anything 'outside their control'. Not necessarily wrong, but it creates many gray areas.
Thus the biggest hurdle in getting promised SLA's is normally due to the provider having exclusions on how his own SLA is measured.
For example, Telkom was quoted recently that they meet their SLA requirements in providing backhaul. But they failed to mention (and the press failed to ask) how this is calculated.
What few people know is that their SLA excludes any situation outside their control, for example cable theft or 'acts of god'. So if the Telkom cables in your area are stolen and you don't have service for a month, they can still claim a 100% availability for the period.
There are a number of issues here. As mentioned by Vodacom3G is the challenge that SP's have to define what 99.9% actually means, and what they can guarantee when a number of factors are outside of their control. The other point is how do you measure the success or failure of the SLA.
For example, I may be an SP who hosts websites on a shared platform. All I can 'guarantee' is the availability of that platform. Although I can mitigate the risk of Telkom line failure, I cannot guarantee against it. All I can do is have back to back OLA's with Telkom so that if I end up paying penalties, then I get it back from them. (I'm not sure if Telkom would ever/have ever agreed to such arrangements).
What about if my customer updates their website and screws it up. They may see it as platform unavailability, when it is again something outside of my control as the hosting provider. Who's responsibility does it become to prove what happened?
What you end up with is the hosting provider having to put so many terms and conditions to their SLA that there will always be a loophole so that they are not responsible.
The other issue around how you measure the success or failure of the "99.9%" availability is also important. If a hosting provider said to me they could offer 99.9% availability, I would say "so what". The site may be available 100% of the time (i.e. you can 'ping' the web server) but that doesn't help me if the platform is so oversubscribed that the performance of may website makes it unusable - it's still 'available' but in practical terms may as not be. And then in an issue like this, is it because of the platform infrastructure performance or poor web site design - and again, who needs to prove that.
The solution is to first of all list the factors in and out of their control. See where back to back OLA's can be established to cater for the 'out of control' factors. Once you have decided on factors that you can base SLA's on, you need to see what you can measure. Depending on what you want to do, there are technologies available to monitor "End User Experience", server performance, application performance on servers, application performance on networks and more. What is key to this is that the monitoring should also provide sufficient analysis of problems to 'prove' responsibility.
In short, what is in my control? what is out of my control? Where can I set up OLA's? What can I measure? what can I prove?
This is a challenging subject and not something that can easily be addresses in a single forum response. For a hosting provider, service guarantees are difficult, but can be done a lot better than they are at the moment.
For example, I may be an SP who hosts websites on a shared platform. All I can 'guarantee' is the availability of that platform. Although I can mitigate the risk of Telkom line failure, I cannot guarantee against it. All I can do is have back to back OLA's with Telkom so that if I end up paying penalties, then I get it back from them. (I'm not sure if Telkom would ever/have ever agreed to such arrangements).
What about if my customer updates their website and screws it up. They may see it as platform unavailability, when it is again something outside of my control as the hosting provider. Who's responsibility does it become to prove what happened?
What you end up with is the hosting provider having to put so many terms and conditions to their SLA that there will always be a loophole so that they are not responsible.
The other issue around how you measure the success or failure of the "99.9%" availability is also important. If a hosting provider said to me they could offer 99.9% availability, I would say "so what". The site may be available 100% of the time (i.e. you can 'ping' the web server) but that doesn't help me if the platform is so oversubscribed that the performance of may website makes it unusable - it's still 'available' but in practical terms may as not be. And then in an issue like this, is it because of the platform infrastructure performance or poor web site design - and again, who needs to prove that.
The solution is to first of all list the factors in and out of their control. See where back to back OLA's can be established to cater for the 'out of control' factors. Once you have decided on factors that you can base SLA's on, you need to see what you can measure. Depending on what you want to do, there are technologies available to monitor "End User Experience", server performance, application performance on servers, application performance on networks and more. What is key to this is that the monitoring should also provide sufficient analysis of problems to 'prove' responsibility.
In short, what is in my control? what is out of my control? Where can I set up OLA's? What can I measure? what can I prove?
This is a challenging subject and not something that can easily be addresses in a single forum response. For a hosting provider, service guarantees are difficult, but can be done a lot better than they are at the moment.
andres101
Expert Member
I was wondering what the real story was... Thanks!
Prof.Merlin
Expert Member
RAS
alkit
Senior Member
Just to correct one point in the article - Afrihost will only offer its double money back guarantee during the FIRST 90 DAYS only. After that, they are not clear as to what their policy is...
99.99% for normal web hosting is a gimmick, 99.9% is fairly easy to achieve.