The SLA – Best effort versus 99.9% versus 100%

What is an SLA?

An SLA is a Service Level Agreement. This is a document we have written, specifying exactly what the guarantees are for our services, and what the ramifications are for not meeting those guarantees.

Best effort

For our personal and Ghost hosting solutions, we only offer a best effort guarantee inside our SLA. This means, we will do everything we can to ensure our services are online 100% of the time, however we do not make any specific guarantees. We aim for 100% availability, and in reality these services are are often above 99.9% available.

99.9% uptime

For our business, performance and cloud services, we offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This guarantee means that if we do not provide 99.9% uptime, we will reimburse you in 5% increments for every hour of downtime, up to 100% of the value of your package. We currently exceed 99.9% uptime.

What if I need more than 99.9%?

It is impossible to offer a 100% uptime guarantee. We cannot guarantee against solar flares, alien invasion, or other kinds of force majeure. So the question really becomes something more complex: If your business loses X dollars/hour for each hour of downtime, is the guarantee required a financial guarantee?

Alternatively, if it is a technical guarantee, perhaps the level of architecture sophistication needs to include multiple points of presence, instead of just one? Serversaurus is always happy to have a conversation about requirements, design, and SLAs to ensure you are receiving what you need, and what you expect.