Uptime guarantees are great!
Especially if valid and properly verified. But what they're promising is not necessarily what we actually need.
I realize this is controversial in some quarters. But, especially for small business owners, let's consider where we stand:
- No leverage: you sign up with some major hosting/cloud provider. Suddenly there's a dispute. What happens? You're offline. Gone.
- Unpredictable: It's impossible to even guess when this might happen. Is it a billing problem? Could they not find your address in whatever database they chose to use? Some unspecified Terms of Service violation that maybe wasn't even you, but a hacker or angry employee/contractor, or even just a misunderstanding? Could be anything. We small business owners KNOW this. How could we not?
- Chances are good you went with whatever company/cloud this was because you figured they were a major player. But...when something goes wrong, where are your backups? How do you access them? How do you recover? Actually, what was backed up in the first place?
- Even assuming all that's always going to be okay...what happens when an employee/contractor messes up your site? And then there's a kerfuffle, and people are angry, and...now what? You just want to revert to last Tuesday's site as of noon, right? Shouldn't be hard, actually. Perhaps it's just a few clicks away. Ahem. IF you're ready for it.
- Is there some "managed" service involved, like perhaps a database? So...you gave up control, and likely paid extra for that, right? Great. But when something goes wrong with the business relationship....
Frankly this all applies to major "enterprise" businesses too, and if they ever did the math, discovering they're likely paying at least 10x the price of just running their own servers for these supposed benefits, well... OR if they realized just how much work they're doing to jump through hoops that are utterly locking them in. But I'm not talking to those guys. They can't hear me.
The truth is, businesses, even large ones, fail all the time. Or get purchased. And arbitrary people make arbitrary decisions affecting their company's customers...all the time. I thought about including some links in this paragraph, but come on. We actually do all know this stuff.
What do we really need? Online business continuity! We don't actually care if some datacenter's internal monitoring system says it's up.
I mean, let's be fair: the uptime guarantees are actually very cool technical achievements. Very likely even valid, in at least some contexts. But...what kind of service level agreement (SLA) do they offer for the actual business relationship failure scenarios? None, right? So if we're accepting their own math (which I actually don't, but that's another topic), what does that tell us? They long ago passed the point of addressing actual failure points. AND by pushing their own "managed" services and backups, they make us ever more dependent on systems beyond our control. IF we let them.
So here we are.
The uptime state of the art is really, truly a marvelous thing. It doesn't really apply to all scenarios...but, still, I don't want to downplay that. BUT it's so ridiculously comprehensive (with caveats, according to me) that it's far outstripped the actual underlying problem: we want our businesses to stay online. When something happens, we need to recover. Quickly. Uptime guarantees, even if somehow utterly valid, do not help at all with this.
Something to consider, eh?