Ahoy, SLA boffins!

Wed Jul 29 21:52:13 UTC 2009

JC Dill wrote:
> William Herrin wrote:
>> The SLA's I've looked at promise me that if their service is hard
>> down for a week (with no ambiguity whatsoever) they'll credit my bill
>> for upwards of 2% of the $50k/year or so I spend on the Internet
>> connection for my mutli-million dollar online service. 
>
> I'm really surprised anyone considers this an SLA, or anything special
> in a business contract.  I automatically expect to get a credit of
> 1.923% if the service were not provided for a period of 168 hours, no
> questions asked and no SLA required.
>
> When service is simply not provided, there's nothing special about not
> having to pay for it.

Read your contract closely and you'll find that, except for an explicit
SLA clause (which will cost you extra), they make no guarantee that the
circuit will work at all and you'll still owe them money.  On top of
that, the SLA payouts are usually capped at an amount _less_ than the
price increase due to demanding an SLA.  If your circuit costs $2k/mo,
and it's down for an entire month, you'll probably still owe them at
least $1500 for that non-service -- and you could buy a non-SLA service
for the same $1500/mo.

(Savvy customers who are spending big bucks know how to negotiate these
terms to be more favorable, but most customers aren't savvy unless
they've already been burned by this.)

S

-- 
Stephen Sprunk         "God does not play dice."  --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723         "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS        dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking

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