Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

Digital Ocean has a 99.99% SLA, but they only refund you for the actual time offline. So if you have their most-popular $10 a month account, you'd only get back $0.0002 per hour of outage.

For folks who complain that Digital Ocean is unreliable compared to other more-expensive providers, did you really expect $5-10/mo hosting to be reliable? It isn't supposed to be rock-solid reliable. It's cheap hosting for messing about with.

View on HN

More-expensive providers go down too. I would never put all my hosting eggs in 1 provider basket. That is asking for trouble. Even big-names like AWS can go down.

True, but more expensive providers have better SLAs. Take Rackspace, for instance. You pay A LOT for their services, but they have more incentive not to go down. They credit you 5% of your monthly fee for each 30 minutes of network downtime. So it isn't just their reputation on the line when an outage occurs. It's quite a bit of money, too.

Source: http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/support/serviceleve...

Sorry for the above, I meant $0.0002 back per minute of outage, not hour. That would be $.0139 per hour back.

I wonder if the people paying $40,$80,$160.... $960/month were affected? I'm thinking yes.

Customers of all sizes were affected. We are very sorry for this and are working extremely hard to ensure that our network is completely stable moving forward so that all customers experience 100% uptime.

True. But even if you were paying $1,000 a month, a 1 hour outage only gets you a $1.39 credit on your bill.

And it's not a matter of how much. It's a matter of how much for what you get, versus how much for what you get from elsewhere. A product that is significantly less expensive simply can't have the same level of hardware and technical support. This also shows in the SLA. Smaller, less expensive providers will credit you for lost time. Larger, more expensive providers will credit you for a % of your monthly bill per hour as a penalty for themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com