[Outages-discussion] [outages-discussion] Another power outage today at Hurricane?

[Nicholas Tang]

My general advice would be to actively negotiate the terms of the SLA,
get both parties to agree, and sign the modified version.  Almost any
company will allow for edits as long as they're negotiated openly and in
good faith.  Sometimes it means editing the SLA directly, sometimes it
means attaching an amendment or addendum, but it's almost always
possible.

But the earlier commenter who pointed out that SLAs are mostly useless
is pretty much right: no matter how aggressive it is, the SLA is
ultimately not going to cover your business losses (or generally any
more than a single month of service costs!) so it's always going to hurt
you more when a service provider goes down than it hurts them.

I've found that having the ability to stop using their services is
generally the best stick to threaten them with - if you can, get
redundant setups, and go into it w/ the concept that you might need to
leave quickly if things go south.  This is of course easier with
services like CDNs or network services than w/ physical services like
colos, but even then it's possible, and losing a paying customer (and
having it become public knowledge) will generally scare them a lot more
than just losing a month of revenue from one (or even several)
customer(s).

Nicholas

-----Original Message-----
From: outages-discussion-bounces at outages.org
[mailto:outages-discussion-bounces at outages.org] On Behalf Of Seth
Mattinen
Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 5:40 PM
To: outages-discussion at outages.org
Subject: Re: [Outages-discussion] [outages-discussion] Another power
outage today at Hurricane?

Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> Discussion moved to outages-discussion at outages.org.
> 
> I think it's this simple: read the SLA before signing the contract.
> Don't like certain clauses?  Strike them out (although many companies 
> will refuse to honour the modified SLA, some actually will depending 
> upon what's been stricken).

SAVVIS apparently reads the contract you send back to them and compares
it to the original (at least they did with me) and wouldn't accept when
it didn't match. It didn't make any operational difference to me other
than being annoyed with the LEC for being idiots thanks to the joy of
multihoming.


> There are other co-location providers in the bay who offer equal (or 
> slightly more -- "slightly" means maybe $25-50) rates with much better

> service, better peering (less shady, more redundancy), and guarantee 
> service reliability with reimbursement for service in 15-minute 
> increments (service hard down for an hour?  credit = rate * 4).

Low cost is king, sadly. I can't remember the last time I had an outage,
but my colo is more expensive because I'm rather small and I can really
only offer a better customer service experience. But I find that isn't
enough either because people would rather complain, accomplish nothing,
forget, and repeat the cycle.

(This is all in general and not directed at HE, whom I've had nothing
but a good experience with their IPv6 tunnel broker.)

~Seth
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