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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

One thing scares me about Linode: I can not find any information with regards to availability guarantees at all. Even when they talk about their "datacenter availability", they're talking about which image slots are available in which datacenter.

EDIT: Ok, I just found some availability information in their FAQ:

http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm

"What we can boast about is our commitment to resolving these issues in the quickest fashion possible. Most customers will tell you the last time they rebooted was to take advantage of a plan upgrade. 99.9% uptime, or your lost time is refunded back to your account. "

This essentially means it's worthless: they're only backing it up with paying you back the time your server was down (they'd better do that!). Looks like they don't have much confidence in themselves in that area.

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sorry, but I don't think I've ever seen any virtual server hosting provider that went further than this. most don't even mention paying you back for lost time, and instead will just give a 99.9% figure without saying what the rolling time on that % is. To be fair, neither are linode, but at least they offer your money back, most don't.

Slicehost's "SLA" is even sillier than the 99.9 percenters:

Here’s our SLA: we’ll do our best to keep your machines running smoothly for as long as possible and get them up ASAP should something go wrong.

SLA's are pretty silly and useless, as a rule. :) They're really only worth caring about if they can get you out of some long term contract. They'll never be good enough to counteract the losses you'll suffer from downtime.

SLA's are not useless, they are just useless for commodity hosting.

If (say) the NYSE was negotiating for a host, they would make sure they had an SLA that gave massive damages if the host failed.

But for commodity hosting, the provider writes the contract. There is no way they are going to expose themselves to your losses other than a fixed refund for the time you lost. Not just because of the costs, but because the costs would be a PITA to calculate. If Twitter goes down and alienates its customers, how would you calculate the damage?

Agreed. However, I'd use a different example to emphasize the point considering that Twitter's fail whale stories are legendary. I'd stick with NYSE.

Even "SLAs with teeth" are pretty useless, speaking as someone who's been involved in negotiating them (on both sides). Like I said, the most useful thing you can get from an SLA is a contract out. Even the NYSE is never going to recoup anything close to their real costs from an outage.

You don't ensure uptime with SLAs, you pick good providers and go for redundancy.

Additionally such agreements (essentially "insurance" against downtime losses) are only as good as your willingness to enforce them. Likely you'll be going to court over anything significant, and paying $100/hr or more to your team of attorneys.

but at least they offer your money back, most don't.

Well, my point is that this money back is basically worthless: say, at some point, your server was down for 4 hours, and you pay $100 / month. This means you would get $0.55 refund for 4 hours of downtime. I'm sorry, but to me that sounds like "we guarantee this amount of uptime, and we back it up by absolutely nothing!".

Not that I expect my damages to be repaid, not at all, but a webhost's availability guarantees are only as good as the money they put in to back it up. If they would, for example, promise to pay back a month of service fees, it would not recover my damages, but at least shows they're a lot more serious about the guarantees they're giving.

Anyway, I do not have anything against Linode, not at all: it's just that I'm wary whenever a webhost is this unclear about availability guarantees. I probably had a few too many bad experiences in the past.

No one has any cast iron guarantees. I've been on linode for about a year now, and only had 1 or 2 outages (Power failure, and one issue with a host update).

While I'm obviously not every Linode user ever, I've had 100% uptime on my ~9-month old slice. It's been an absolute dream.

Are you a linode or slicehost user?

Slicehost calls their VPS instances slice, so it seems he is a slicehost user.

I think he's a Linode user... He used "slice" which is SliceHost's trademark but I see that term used for a lot of different companies.

to be fair to linode, this is what nearly all providers do, if you complain, they refund you for the time you were down. To my knowledge, nobody in this price bracket has a real SLA. (at one point I had a pretty tough one myself, but I've weakened it to the point where it's not much better than normal.)

If you are designing a high availability application it is probably prudent to assume a single cluster will provide roughly 99% uptime (if the operators are good). So multi-homing across several locations and providers makes a lot of sense even for a small player.

I've had a linode for 2 years and never had a downtime due to them.

they had system-wide (cross data center) downtime (as low as 1 hour, others several hours) on October 7th.

It didn't affect all hosts.

I had clusters of hosts running in multiple data centers (to be certain of staying up) and they broke them all at once and did not email me. It drove me nuts. That said, maybe they will be extra careful making system-wide software changes in the future.

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