"Given the choice, I'm sure most rational businesses would prefer the uptime over the credit."
How would you propose to compensate with uptime (if I've understood correctly)? Interested to learn your thoughts on this.
How would you propose to compensate with uptime (if I've understood correctly)? Interested to learn your thoughts on this.
My thoughts on the matter are this:
* Nearly any compensation is "not enough" to a customer. They would have rather had the service not come down.
* It is nearly always better to use extravagant SLA breach compensation for higher redundancy. [1]
* Because 100% uptime is prohibitively expensive, transparency about historical uptime is vital for a prospect making a buying decision.
* The most fair way to compensate a customer for downtime is to take out an insurance policy against your service for the cost of downtime to your customer. (This is unique to each customer, and service should be priced accordingly.) [1]
1: Customers should be compensated for downtime, if at the very least because they aren't able to use the service they paid for. If additional money can't be used for additional redundancy/reliability, it can be used to insure against the cost of downtime.
Edit: After re-reading your question, I see that I misunderstood your question. I don't mean to say "Your customer was down for an hour, give them an hour (or more) for free." I actually meant "Your customer was down for an hour. That costs them $XX,XXX in headache. You can't expect to compensate them enough to cover that, so it would be better to avoid the downtime."