> I don't think I'd be willing to sell anyone a 100% uptime 24/7/365 product for only $1000/month.
I worked at a company that sold a 24/7/365 product with a 100% uptime SLA for $1000/month.
I don't think it really did what anyone wanted. On one side of the coin, people valued the service at more than they paid for it. One customer wrote in to complain that they lost millions of dollars because of a scheduled outage. For a million dollars, you could have had a backup circuit, or at least called us to reschedule the planned maintenance (which we tended to be flexible about, and weren't covered under the SLA anyway). I am not sure what their true motivations were, but I think they assumed that the fine print said "we can guarantee you that there will be no natural disasters, etc." when in reality it said "if our shit turns off, we won't charge you". While the legalese made it clear what the SLA was, the customer's expectation from the simplified wording ("100% uptime") was not what the document said. That is risky in terms of customer satisfaction.
Other customers we would refund, but their automated ACH bill payment would send the full amount next month, so we had to track them down to tell them that they overpaid. This resulted in a lot of work for them for some trivial amount of money. We did honor our agreement, but the accounts payable person at the other company ended up having to do a lot of meaningless work that didn't really benefit them -- they don't care if their company pays $900 or $1000 per month for some service. I think we should have just sent them cookies or something as opposed to making them redo all their expense reports for $100 or whatever. At least they would personally be able to enjoy a cookie.
Personally, I would never sell someone an SLA without having first measured my uptime extensively, and then I wouldn't sell them something that I've never observed in the past. If we had 5 minutes of downtime last year, I would be hesitant to guarantee 99.999% uptime. I'm not a good business person, though.
I worked at a company that sold a 24/7/365 product with a 100% uptime SLA for $1000/month.
I don't think it really did what anyone wanted. On one side of the coin, people valued the service at more than they paid for it. One customer wrote in to complain that they lost millions of dollars because of a scheduled outage. For a million dollars, you could have had a backup circuit, or at least called us to reschedule the planned maintenance (which we tended to be flexible about, and weren't covered under the SLA anyway). I am not sure what their true motivations were, but I think they assumed that the fine print said "we can guarantee you that there will be no natural disasters, etc." when in reality it said "if our shit turns off, we won't charge you". While the legalese made it clear what the SLA was, the customer's expectation from the simplified wording ("100% uptime") was not what the document said. That is risky in terms of customer satisfaction.
Other customers we would refund, but their automated ACH bill payment would send the full amount next month, so we had to track them down to tell them that they overpaid. This resulted in a lot of work for them for some trivial amount of money. We did honor our agreement, but the accounts payable person at the other company ended up having to do a lot of meaningless work that didn't really benefit them -- they don't care if their company pays $900 or $1000 per month for some service. I think we should have just sent them cookies or something as opposed to making them redo all their expense reports for $100 or whatever. At least they would personally be able to enjoy a cookie.
Personally, I would never sell someone an SLA without having first measured my uptime extensively, and then I wouldn't sell them something that I've never observed in the past. If we had 5 minutes of downtime last year, I would be hesitant to guarantee 99.999% uptime. I'm not a good business person, though.