Simplifying and extrapolating, it seems to me that they normally boil down to this: “if our product that you pay us $1,000 per month for, upon which you depend so that you would incur losses of $1,000 per hour if it was down, goes down¹ for more than 43 minutes in any given month (half an hour of downtime is all hunky dory, right? 99.9% looks good, right?), we’ll give you back 10% of your monthly fee for every hour it’s down, up to your monthly fee (so now from minute 43 for the next ten hours you’ll only lose $900 per hour!)”.
From the ones I’ve seen, I can’t understand why anyone would pay for them, because they seem to be utterly toothless.
I mean seriously, I’d prefer to offer that kind of SLA to all users on any product at no cost: it shows I’m serious about the product and care, and practically costs little (the absolute disaster case is a month’s revenue) and can be perceived as a goodwill gesture if it ever needs to be invoked.
The idea of charging people extra just to say “yeah, I’ll actually provide the service you already paid for” rubs me the wrong way. But I bet some business types would baulk at not having this SLA line they can upsell on.
Am I being unreasonable?
¹ For some excessively strict definition of “down”, so that we might only count half of the actual downtime.