I wonder how many small businesses with websites actually understand what is meant by an SLA (Service Level agreement) and of those how many actually know what the SLA is with their webhosting provider? Very few I would imagine, and that's not a criticism of the users, its a criticism of the hosting providers who very rarely give meaningfull information in their SLA's - assuming they provide such a thing. One might  expect this at the low end of the market where you are paying a few pounds a month for hosting but when a company approaches you offering a dedicated server at upwards of £250 per month you expect something fairly concrete in terms of an SLA. In a lot of cases you will be offered 99.9% uptime which sounds very good, if you read the small print that may well be uptime of network connectivity to your server, power supply to your server or in some cases both. Very rarely do you see retail web hosting providers offering 99.9% availability of your website, which after all is the bit that matters. Why is this? Well most retail web hosters don't have thier own data centres, they rent space in commercial data centres who offer the hosting provider an SLA. This SLA from the datacentre will specify network and power availability and it is this SLA which is quoted to the retail customer. What the data centre doesn't cover is the server itself which will belong to the hosting company. The hosting company won't have their own engineers on site at the data centre, and they will likely not have built in any redundancy in the server they have provided so it is virtually impossible for them to offer any gurantees should a problem with the server arise. Add to this the level of reselling that goes on the the webhosting industry and you realise what an uncertain tangle it all is. My advice? Welll the first thing is to understand how much down time you would be prepared to accept for your site. If it is a brochure site that sees little traffic you might be comfortable with a couple of days (not unrealistic). If you run an e-commerce site then downtime will cost, the question then is does the business lost through downtime cost you more than hosting with a clear SLA?

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