If I've understood your situation correctly - then yes, this would be an issue that is covered by our SLA. Our customer data is actually hosted on two separate storage backends for issues like failing disk drives.
Our approach on this is that when we offer a service to you, you should not be worried about how the physical equipment functions - it should just work. Hence all issues on that front would be our responsibility. Glad to talk more on this if you're interested. My contact details can be found on our company website.
I would definitely buy a car if they advertised it to never break down - if the compensation on the promise would be good enough!
But seriously speaking, a 99.99% SLA is not more realistic or achievable in itself than any other SLA promise. It all depends on the provider (how they strive to reach that promise) and what they promise in return if the promise is broken.
Thanks for the comment! A 100% SLA is actually a promise of future uptime. Nobody can of course guarantee their uptime, no matter what the SLA percentage. Thus, the company includes compensation in the agreement if the service level is not met. All this of course is decided based on historical data and what makes business sense for the company, ie. how much money are they willing to lose if their services go down.
Thanks for the comment. I work at UpCloud so I'll chip in my 2c on the issue. Your description of "how much money providers are willing to risk" is a great way to approach this. While it doesn't probably give you the most universal view on redundancy - it is a good, comparative measure of how much companies are willing to risk if their services go down.
Building multi-cloud services is of course a way to try and avoid this, but I would say that this approach isn't very well adopted as of yet.
Having said that, those utilising cloud hosting services will need to balance their own risk levels with those of the companies they are looking at and find the best match. Another way to approach this is to ask; how much am I willing to risk my business for the benefit of this company offering me a cloud hosting service?
Full disclosure: I work at UpCloud, a cloud hosting provider and I think business in this industry day and night.
One thing that gets overlooked in almost all comparisons is the pricing models. I actually use Glacier through Arq (brilliant backup for Mac), but the catch is in the requests. I recently uploaded 200GB of photos to glacier and the upload process cost me about $10. The monthly storage is about $2.
The thing is that you shouldn't compare the sole storage price, but the total of cost of storing your data in glacier, which was also overlooked in the original article.
I'm sure AWS has understood this through their S3 storage lifecycle and thus developed an appropriate pricing model for glacier that arouses interest in the product like no other.
Naturally the user is always responsible for the purchase he/she makes. However, if I (OP) make my selections and need to re-enter some information based on their request - I don't think that allows them to change my decisions from what I have chosen earlier, especially if you get an error message similar to "please check your credit card number".
It is also a de facto standard in general that sites do not change once set selections when fixing errors in the original form and once you differ from this you're bound to increase burden on your customer support.
OP here. They haven't refused of a refund per se, but since I am unable to reach them with the second request - it is comparable to "let's leave this be and maybe it will go away".
Disclaimer: I work for UpCloud, also a cloud hosting company.
This is a great question. Something I've been thinking about a lot is also the benchmarking of redundancy and the protection of one's data.
It's easy to benchmark performance, but as Pirelli stated in their advertising: speed is nothing without control. I feel the same about online hosting providers.
Naturally I have no knowledge of US redundancy solutions, but it's one of the most critical yet toughest things to compare when choosing a new hosting provider.
Thanks for the honest feedback! We're going to be benchmarking ourselves against other providers on Serverbear and CloudHarmony, for example, in the near future.
Thanks for letting us know - if you can't sign-in or activate your account for this reason, please contact our support to solve the issue. You can e-mail them here: [email protected].
Thanks for the question! ZenCoder and other resource intensive cases are what our service was built for.
The item in the UAP is there by our lawyers to make sure we can take steps to prevent abuse on the infrastructure by others (and thus possibly hurting others' performance).
So please run ZenCoder on our platform and do let us know how it compares to others :)