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Originally Posted by ldcdc
In a way, I like your approach. Customers too often think that the stated uptime uptime guarantee is the worst case scenario/worst level of uptime they will have, and hosts take advantage of this, when in fact the guarantee is simply monetary.
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That infers, though, that the monetary aspect is only at a customer level. Companies push the envelope on uptime guarantees for two main reasons:
1) Give the clients peace of mind with monetary compensation in the event of an outage that brings the SLA in to place.
2) Keep their internal cogs turning as efficiently as possible. It's an unfortunate fact of life that people work harder when money is on the line. An SLA that puts the company's money on the line guarantee's a few things:
1. When a tech is working on something, no matter how big or small, they take that much extra care.
2. When choosing a datacenter or NOC, a company will choose more wisely, research that little bit more, push floor staff to work with more care and accuracy, etc.
3. Usually, there's an internal opposite of the public SLA. I know at least 20 other companies that operate under this policy: For every month that there isn't a issue that results in the company shelling out cash/credits to the clients, the techs get a bonus of 10-20% (the highest I have heard of is 40%) on their assigned client pool.
An SLA is more than skin deep. It's very important to realise that the public offering is just the beginning, in many cases, of a deep-rooted policy that forms many other policies within the company.
Simon