Hosts with the mosts: Getting to grips with SLAs for the cloud

When email is down, businesses cease to function. If the email goes down due to a mishandling of the Exchange server, the appropriate sysadmin is found and duly berated. Finger pointing exercises are less well defined when email stops working because Gmail is down. Again. In this case the sysadmin in question bears no direct …

[James Geldart]

keep your customers informed....

Every system has downtime, and hosted services tend to be far more resilient than machines in a cupboard at the back of the office. But what's really vital is letting your customers know what's going on, as my host, 1&1, singularly failed to do during a recent email outage. No status panel, nothing anywhere on their website or management portal, nothing on Twitter, no explanation at all, just no SMTP and no webmail for about 3 hours.

All they'd needed to do was to post a status message saying, we are having problems with our email servers, we expect the problem to be fixed in X hours, and I could probably have lived with it a lot more easily than having no idea when my email was going to work again