The occasional refreshing post where someone who knows something about how teh IntarWebs work are the only glimpses of sanity in a vast sea of clueless-ness…it’s AOL all over agan, all right!

It really is nothing more than a marketing gimmick, when you’re paying chump change for a shared hosting account.

It’s funny that people will steer clear of unlimited bandwidth & disk space (smart move), yet get a warm fuzzy feeling in their belly when they see the SLA crap all over a web site.

You could even have an account @ DH with no SLA, resell the space, and give your clients any SLA you want. Doing that, you could technically take on customers that wanted to avoid DH because they think an SLA means something, and put them right where they didn’t want to be.

Super Lame Apology - http://blog.dreamhost.com/2007/02/28/super-lame-apology/

I’d recommend getting a host that offers an SLA on up-time then.

An SLA doesn’t do anything. Dreamhost could put a 100% SLA up right now and all it would change is that they’d throw a few pennies at whiners to pacify them during downtime–if they jumped through enough hoops and followed the correct procedures to collect on it. Seeing how many people can’t even find the support form, I’ll guess that hardly anyone would be able to figure out how to collect the credit.

Plus, most SLAs are network SLAs. Hardware problems? $0. Thinking your site is down because you can’t figure out how to run a traceroute? $0. Software problems? $0. Whoa, look at those credits add up!

People often mention Rackspace when talking about SLAs. Even Rackspace, with their fancy SLA and sky-high pricing, has a one-hour hardware replacement SLA. What good is a 100% uptime if your server isn’t part of it? And the hour doesn’t even include rebuilding RAID arrays or OS reloading.

But, if they do take over an hour, they’ll give you a whopping 5% credit for each hour after that. So, at $500/month, that would be a $25 credit for 2 hours of downtime. Is that really good? Nope. You’d be pissed that you were paying $500/month for two hours of downtime.

That would be a HUGE fifty cent credit at DH pricing. Like that would actually shut anyone up. And you’d have to work for it–they don’t just hand it over.

An SLA is nothing unless you’re spending hundreds or thousands per month, where it can actually add up to an amount worth filling out forms to collect it. Even a $500/month bill is barely worth it. If you’re getting a lot of SLA money because you’re shelling out a bunch of $$$/month, then it would seem to indicate that you’re not getting the level of service you thought you were paying for.

Hmm… it’s almost as if SLAs are nothing more than marketing gimmicks. I’m shocked!

Anyway, thank you Dreamhost, for not insulting our intelligence with a lame SLA.

Also, here’s a few problems SLAs don’t fix:
- You still have downtime.
- Your customers will still yell at you.
- Your business will still lose money while collecting a small credit.

If only there was a way to not rely on a single host for uptime. Hmm… if only someone would invent a system that failed over somehow. We could call it failover DNS. Of course, hardly anyone would go for it, because actual redundancy (not free) isn’t as fun as whining about downtime and trying to blame business failures on shared hosts.

This is where you both lose your argument and any shred of sympathy. What kind of business (that’s obviously critical to your income, judging by your misguided ranting) runs on shared hosting? Who is unprofessional now?