It is always an interesting discussion when the subject of downtime is raised. People host to take a complex and often scary competency out of their hands to a trusted advisor.
If the application engine service stops and people cannot login, is the hosting service down? We have had customers call us down when their cable company was down. What about maintenance windows? Is that downtime? For a while we had the philosophy of if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, but in today’s security environment you must continuously patch and reboot. Is that downtime?
In general, when looking at uptime we originally thought, if system availability issues could have been controlled it should count as downtime. We had zero controllable downtime for our first 12 years when our data center had a 4 second power blip. All servers were up and running within 1 hour after most restarted, it had to be restarted due to order of reboot. However, this changed our view of what is downtime. It was not controllable by us, but what does that mean to the customer?
Now we have two thoughts on downtime.
1) the most important measure of downtime is customer perception. The old adage, “the customer is always right” is not just for retail.
2) what constitutes as downtime for service credits. This is a contractual legal definition and even then, we paid service credits for an excluded item, cyber attack.
Downtime is like ROR changes. It happens and is part of the business model. You want to minimize it to the greatest extent possible regardless of fault, and how you deal with it depends upon your corporate culture. If you are becoming the new ROR do you call the existing partner of record? If a customer is leaving you, do you help the new partner serve the customer? When a hosting customer is down, regardless of fault, how does it react?
Just like when a customer whose software is down wants to know when it will be up before you triage the issue, hosting companies response time will vary depending up on the nature of the root cause, regardless of how much they care and sometimes even their competency. Although you can’t give them an answer to the only thing they want to know, I believe you have to acknowledge their pain and communicate with respect.
After 20 years, I personally have evolved my approach to business to be squarely focused on the customer, their perspective, and what do we need to do to serve them better.
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Gary Feldman
President
I-Business Network, LLC
Marietta GA
6786270646 x224
http://www.i-bn.com/---------------------------------