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Written by Larry Dearing
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Saturday, 16 January 2010 15:14 |
There can be a lot of questions about uptime guarantee and what happens if you host doesn't meet it. If you read through your host's TOS agreement it will probably shed some light but you must know some of the terminology that may be used as there are some terms used that may seem the same but actually are not.
Uptime Guarantee:
This is commonly a guarantee that the host's service will be available for your use a certain percentage of the time noted. This percentage will be stated as something like 99% or so and is actually a percentage for the current month. The clock starts the over the each month. Hosts usually back up this guarantee with a credit for the month's hosting bill for the period they were below this mark. They will not compensate you for lost customers, lost revenue or inconvenience. For free hosting you won't receive any thing tangible, but perhaps if you have a posting quota you can urge your host to credit you with those posts, though I have not actually seen that offered in any free hosting TOS's or uptime guarantee statements.
Uptime Promise:
This is more of what you are dealing with in very small hosting, stacked accounts, or free hosting. They may be using the term Guarantee, but it's really only a best effort promise. This basically means that you are not going to receive any compensation at all. It's more of a mutual understanding. You take the risk of downtime based on your confidence in your host's past performance and their back-end infrastructure. They take the risk that if they are down too often you will go somewhere else. I have seen many hosts actually use this term in place of Uptime Guarantee.
Service Level Agreement:
I offer this last explanation mostly as information to define what really warrants penalties hosts pay to customers. In large scale enterprise level network provisioning or hosting a Service Level Agreement, or SLA as it is known in the industry, spells out financial penalties a provider will pay if the performance of the service falls below a mutually agreed upon contractual level. Obviously you would only see this in the largest of network / hosting arrangements. These are still usually not direct compensation for lost revenue, but do spell out specific and usually quite large financial penalties for not providing the contracted level of service. |
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