Comments on: Google weasels out of uptime promise? Not so fast

Small Google Apps outages can accumulate without Google paying a penalty, Pingdom concludes. But service level agreements don't tell the whole story.

[bonesbautista]

Whatever, Google. It's not just the outages - notifications that the server isn't available, the password's incorrect don't count? <Rant> Daily issues and failures today and every day this and last week for my Premier accounts finally did it for me.

I can see owners of free accounts not having too much of a legit gripe, but I bought into it. Great spam filters just don't cut it for me anymore. </Rant>

[AppleSuxLeo]

I heard they are cutting back on bean-bag chairs , dry cleaning , and child care service.
Oh , the humanity !

[honorable1]

Google, please dry up and go away.

[jeffyablon]

SLAs . . . one of my favorite topics. Kinda like when an OCR program claims to have 99.9% accuracy. Well, that's one error in each 1000 characters, or two per page. Lotta editing time FINDING those!



I advice my ISP clients that they shouldn't give customers an SLA, and instead explain how silly they are and that their intent is to honor their commitments, instead.



Are you listening, Google?



[CNET editors' note: URL removed]

[davelaurello]

From the customers? point of view, what is the difference between a ?real outage and intermittent errors?" Their service is down either way. If this discussion illustrates one thing, it?s that availability is an illusive pursuit that very few IT service providers ? internal or outsourced ? or technology suppliers do well ? claims to the contrary notwithstanding. As a consequence, the companies that make up our industry are working hard to dumb down discourse on the subject and to set service expectations below what customers have a right to expect. The assertion that one provider?s SLA is identical to others? in the industry is an only excuse for keeping the bar low, or dodging the fact that they are ill prepared to deliver what they claim they can with their current solution. Either way, the customer loses out. If we had conducted our relationship with customers in such a fashion instead of committing to five nines availability -- no ifs, ands or buts -- Stratus Technologies would have been out of business long ago.