vilpponen

"Given the choice, I'm sure most rational businesses would prefer the uptime over the credit."

How would you propose to compensate with uptime (if I've understood correctly)? Interested to learn your thoughts on this.

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.

Hey, this is the GM of UpCloud. Feel free to ask me anything or e-mail me. You can find my e-mail from our company page under contacts.

I used to work on ArcticStartup with Karri Saarinen for several years. Grew to respect his views on simplicity, beauty and function.

Congrats gents on the latest developments!