There are companies that guarantee 100% uptime – a bold claim in anyone’s book, but what is this claim really worth? It would be an impressive feat to achieve – but I would be surprised if any provider genuinely managed to achieve this lofty aim.
In our experience we have used providers with such guarantees, and then had downtime despite the promises. This is when you realize that the important part of the uptime guarantee is what the provider offers when things fail despite the promises.
SLI has learned over the years that each component of a system can fail, see our recent blog post The Story of the outage That Wasn’t on how we have enhanced our approach over the 10 years we have been in business. SLI has multiple servers, in multiple locations with multiple hardware, network, and DNS providers to provide resilience when items fail.
When making decisions about your providers, it’s important to look further than the uptime promise. The better providers admit that failures happen and plan for these contingencies, they have transparent communications and are always working to improve their systems.
