There’s been quiet a lot of chatter today about levels of service from different hosting providers. One instance outbreaks to a full denial of a customers account, another could not be self contained and ended up in a customer service feud. The question is, how is the most effective method of managing and containing these instances/outbreaks/occurrences?

Providing hosting services to customers is a hard task in itself. It starts at the SLA level, having to ensure your customers get the SLA the business and customer have signed. Creating high availability plans and deploying them to ensure the business stays on top and the SLA doesn’t have the option of failing. Ensuring redundancy is available throughout the network and equipment. That’s the network and equipment the company manages taken care of.

Next - What about all the equipment and network area’s the company doesn’t directly manage? All of these need to be in a high availability configuration also. Extra connections need to be inserted to ensure, if a route dies, another is instigated immediately. But most importantly, the company needs to ensure their SLA’s with their carriers is up held and doesn’t need to be applied in a none positive effect!

OK, so your afloat. Your providing a hosting service to many and it’s all working in safe operational limits. Things are feeling good, there’s money on the way in to the bank account. Lets pay the wages….BANG….some piece of equipement has failed, the failover high availability carbon copy of the equipment failed also. Call the on site engineer and get them working. 1 hour of downtime ensued. On-site engineer calls in a hardware fault, no replacement hardware on site 2hrs, 3hrs etc etc. SLA is starting to look like it’s going to be digged out by all of the companies clients.

This is one of a hundred things that could possibly go wrong. My point I guess is, there is very very very little talk, recognition or even positive feedback to hosting providers 99.999% of the SLA agreed time they have all of your services running like a dream.  But the 0.001% time something does go wrong, the blogs are written, the emails are sent, the slander is ensued……give the lads a break.

[All spelling mistakes are blamed on Lee Kutner, as she is lying beside me and nugging  me to close the laptop.]